Cara Johnson utilises a craft-based practice to interrogate narratives surrounding land use through materials, intention and invested making processes. Informed by her environment, Cara’s practice is intertwined with her rural location in which she works in isolation surrounded by bushland and sheep paddocks. Currently through her work she seeks to comprehend the brutality that has been (or continues to be) inflicted on land through agricultural and land clearing practices.

Utilising agricultural refuse, weed plant species and what remains from regeneration projects her work engages primarily with the jewellery vernacular to rework these materials while drawing upon tensions between people and plants, and ideas around control. Cara’s work has been shown in Schmuck, in Munich in 2022, at Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney, in the 2022 Victorian Craft Awards and the 2011 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery.

During her residency she will experiment with scale in a new way using smocked plastic tree guards, with a plan to make a significant, innovative crafted artwork that sits outsides of a jewellery scale, while maintaining jewellery sensitivities.

Cara Johnson is represented by Gallery Funaki