Christine Johnson

View Christine’s recent exhibition catalogue here

Since her first solo exhibition of paintings in Melbourne in 1989, Christine has exhibited widely.  She combines an interest in historical narratives, landscape and native flora, exploring ideas through painting, drawing and printmaking.

 The edition of prints, HER Story is dedicated to the legacy of Mallee botanist, Hilda Eileen Ramsay. The prints are created from pastel drawings made after Christine’s own field trips into the Mallee.

As Above, So Below.

These artworks are inspired by the legacy of the Mallee botanist Hilda Eileen Ramsay (1886-1961). Her story resonates with me because of the courageous and creative way in which she lived her own life after the tragic loss of her two brothers, Alan and Tom Couve, who were killed at Gallipoli in 1915. The Couve family didn’t know of any details of their deaths for several years. Four of Hearts and The Blue Notebook are paintings of ephemera in the Australian War Memorial that hold some of that history.

After the war, Eileen moved to the Mallee with her parents where her father, Joson Couve, opened a pharmacy to help returning soldiers in the new soldier settlement. This was where, in later life, Eileen began creating her botanical collection.

I saw the collection for the first time at the Mildura Arts Centre in 2015. (It is now held at the National Herbarium of Victoria). With the help of local plant enthusiasts, I was shown the mysteries of the Mallee landscape and its beguiling flora. Together we set about finding Eileen Ramsay’s plants in the remnant native landscape, and this is how the drawings for HER Story began.

You get a sense of deep layers of time in the Mallee. The only lifeline is the Murray River winding through the harsh semi-arid desert, leaving pools and billabongs behind after heavy and often erratic seasonal flooding. My painting, Terra Madre, is painted from a bend in the Murray River at Red Cliffs, near where Eileen Ramsay lived.

The two coastal paintings, Terra Aria and Terra Aqua, are dedicated to the memory of Eileen’s father. Joson Couve was French-Mauritian and came to Australia on a sugar ship, the Lindores Abbey, which passed through the heads at Point Nepean on 1 April, 1883, leaving behind forever the turquoise water and coral sands of the Isle de France as Mauritius was once known. Joson died in 1930 and is buried at the Red Cliffs Pioneer Cemetery.

The title of the exhibition, As Above, So Below is an extract from a Hermetic text:

“As within, so without, as above, so below, as the universe, so the soul.”