5 & 5 with Melanie Johnson
Melanie Johnson is an artist and educator from Kansas City who was recently awarded a residency at Studios Inc. She creates large-scale charcoal drawings envisioning the emotional relationships between flora, fauna, and the female figure. Studios Inc. Assistant Gallery Manager Jaede Bayala asks Johnson “5 Questions in 5 Minutes” as part of our new series highlighting A.I.R.’s and their works.
Q: The emotions in your pieces are quite profound. How do you approach mood when creating your work?
A: It is something that happens in the process, and it's one of those things that is difficult to articulate verbally. In my sketches, there's a mood I'm trying to achieve and I don't know if it's working until it's happening in the drawing. I have a loose idea when I get started. A lot of the time the work is based on lived experience and mythological narrative, but it’s never totally direct. I'll have some ideas of imagery that will appear and this often starts on a piece of typing paper where I make non-sensical scribbles and thoughts. A lot of times that’s enough to get the drawing up and going but the work changes pretty drastically over the process of creating.
Q: Animals often appear alongside human figures in your art. Do they serve as protectors for the female figures, or do they hold another symbolic meaning?
A: I've been working with the figure for a long time. I made self-portraits and used my own body very loosely to develop characters. When I started thinking about incorporating animals into the work, I imagined these animal protagonists. The figures are obscured, there is no identity. The animals have more of a presence there. So thinking about the agency and authority in that narrative, and having them on more level ground. I keep toying with that.
Q: Many of your works are quite large in scale. How do you think size contributes to their overall impact?
A: I think about them as being theatrical spaces like a stage or a diorama. The viewer needs to be able to engage with the space. It allows for this to unfold over a longer period of time. There's the immediacy of the space itself, but like when you sit out in the woods, the longer you’re there the more you notice.
Q: Can you walk us through your process for bringing these natural environments to life on paper?
A: It's been dictated by my workspace. For the most part, I've been working wall to wall in my studio space or living room, so that allows for one large drawing to happen or some smaller pieces to happen. I usually tend to work on one piece at a time and they happen relatively quickly. I have lots of reference material that's been collected over a long period of time. It really is composed on the page. Figuring out what the actual imagery is, is this push-pull relationship that comes from paying attention to how plants behave. Looking at what that plant does, how the leaves lay, and then that repetition can happen organically. The animals I use are sourced from a lot of my own images I take and that I collect over time.
Q: How has the prairie landscape of Missouri influenced your work?
A: I grew up in Kansas City north of the river and my dad was a veterinarian. I had access to 40 acres of pasture, so a lot of my formative experiences were being outside without supervision for hours at a time. When I was older I went back to that property where I grew up and I ended up spending time with a horse and making sketches. What I noticed is that the landscape hasn't changed in 40 years. That space evolved in parallel to my trajectory. So thinking about that space having agency, there were even plants that I didn't know the names of and required investigation. It sounds barren but being in an environment that is so alive and so rich there is a whole narrative that’s happening out of human experience and that informs the work moving forward.
Q: How do you see your work evolving now that you'll have access to a larger studio space?
A: I'm really looking forward to leaning into the immersiveness of the spaces depicted in the drawings. I think having a larger studio will allow me to engage with the scale of the drawings more seamlessly.
Learn more about Johnson, her work, and practice at https://melanielynnjohnson.com/ and be sure to visit Studios Inc | 2025, March 7th - May 10th at The Studios Inc Exhibition Hall to see “Garden of Bewilderment”.
