CIRCA 111 article

Sandra Johnston

Sandra Johnston: Composure, 2004, performance still; courtesy the artist; performance was part of Relations project organised by Bbeyond

Responding to Sandra Johnston’s Composure (2004), performed in Catalyst Arts, Belfast, as part of the Relations Project organised by Bbeyond.

In a room dominated by two large glass windows, a video monitor played a looped extract of footage, originally broadcast in 1976, of Jane Ewart-Biggs delivering a testimonial to her husband Christopher Ewart Biggs, who had been killed by an IRA car bomb. In a voice suffused with grief, Ewart-Biggs pays tribute to her late husband, before slumping exhaustedly into her seat. As this five-minute footage was played again and again, a barefooted Johnston slowly moved from windowpane to windowpane, drawing with her eyes closed onto the glass with one finger dipped into a cup of saline liquid. She revisited each pane when the drawings had eventually dried, blew chalk dust onto them and by rubbing it into their surfaces, rendered them visible. By the time the space was opened to the audience in the evening, Johnston had been engaged in this activity for six hours.

With each replay, the video footage became increasingly difficult to watch. In the absence of points of reference for understanding the events surrounding the slaying of Ewart-Biggs, and his wife’s subsequent broadcast of sorrow and anger, the texture of her distress became emphasised. Simultaneously, their repetition meant her words could become over-familiar, so that in empathy and ignorance, one could commit them to memory without an understanding of their wider context. The artist’s gestures were delicate, and had an indistinct relation to the footage. Was this an aesthetics of trauma, the juxtaposing of Ewart-Biggs’ eulogy with inscriptions of opaque filigree on a window? Or was it, as I am inclined to think, a performance that sought to unfold questions of if and how an artist can represent and bear witness to the trauma of others?

Sandra Johnston: Composure, 2004, performance still; courtesy the artist

As both the editor of the video loop and the performer present alongside it within the space, Johnston eschewed claims to a mythic objectivity or transparency, and explicitly took responsibility for her work and the issues it raises. Working with representations of the trauma of other people, frequently other women, she does not try to avoid the question of her positioning in relation to her subjects. She is willing to tread precarious ground, negotiating the power relation involved in representing others, and distinguishing between engagement and appropriation, benevolent humanism and political responsibility, compassion and self-aggrandisement.

By presenting dilemmas and the warp and weft of their components, rather than presuming to transcend, solve or resolve them, Johnston is prepared to leave herself vulnerable. That her work can become invested with audience expectations of an engagement with trauma leaves it susceptible to any variety of over- and under-readings. There’s also the potential for dubious projections onto, or expectations of the artist as some sort of conscience of troubled locations. I say this as someone who finds that responding to Johnston’s work also means attempting to negotiate these fine lines.

Suzanna Chan is Research Associate at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.68–69

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