Invocation - Linda Johns
Sculpture in Stone and Whalebone, Wood and Clay

Guest Curator, Jeffrey Parker

NSCCD
NOVA SCOTIA CENTRE FOR CRAFT AND DESIGN
MARY E. BLACK GALLERY

A new exhibition, Invocation: Sculpture in Stone and Whalebone, Wood and Clay by Linda Johns, opens Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 6 pm at the Mary E. Black Gallery at the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, 1061 Marginal Road, Halifax.

Linda Johns is a nationally known visionary artist, award winning writer and naturalist whose unique life and artwork explore the enduring invisible forces at work within the visible world. Her work in acrylic painting, linocut prints, ink pen and brush drawings, carvings in wood, stone, clay and bone, all integrate archetypal symbolism with her knowledge and sensitivity to the energies and life-forms of our natural world.

Johns has been working as a professional artist for over 30 years, amassing a body of work that is astounding in its mastery of technique, content and originality. Both the visual and written outpourings of this multifaceted artist are unlike any other contemporary creative voice coming out of the Maritimes. Honouring the scope of her vision, and to draw attention to one aspect of her artistic endeavours that has remained somewhat overlooked, Curator Jeffrey Parker puts focus on Johns’ sculpture and has developed an exhibition of 30 carvings in whalebone, antler, wood, stone and clay.

Invocation brings together the most eloquent and provocative carved sculptures of Linda Johns’s career selected from over 130 accumulated works, many of which have never been exhibited before. As stated by Parker, all Johns’s work exemplifies her extraordinary ability to convey elemental forces at work in an interdependent natural world with the utmost reverence for its exquisite beauty and integrity. Following currents of wind and water, she journeys through the ebb and flow cycles of instinct, survival, seasonal change, the rhythmic round of sun and moon, all the time riding the wings of life force and intuitive insight. Johns implores us to connect with this continuity, to challenge the conventions of exploitation and destructive greed. This is the Invocation. It is for the reverence we must restore.

The exhibition continues through September 6, 2009. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 9 – 5 and Saturday and Sunday, 11 – 4.

For photographs and further information contact Susan MacAlpine Foshay at 492-2522 or susan@craft-design.ns.ca

Click here to read the Curatorial Statement