Johannah Fennessy is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans from alternative photographic processes to sculptural interventions. Their work is responding to the current environmental crisis and curating future relics.
Johannah’s Practice is a sculptural instillation practice. Their work is informed by natural and manmade urban infrastructural materials found in their immediate environment. The works engage the intersection where these natural and manmade object combine or coalesce. The work considers the mass production and markers of the Anthropocene, such as manufactured steel, concrete and plastic which are signifiers of human design. These architectural markers of time will outlive their custom-built purpose, and in that time new non-anthropocentric relationships will form.
In using salvaged materials with past lives, the work encourages a reimagining of their purpose. In using transitionary objects which hold, bind, and support human social ecologies the work challenges the conventional anthropocentric perspectives of these objects and advocates for a more holistic and symbiotic understanding of the world. Taking a new materialist approach to the work gives agency to the objects and constructs a world where the humans are removed but their objects, synthesised from steel and chemicals remain. These works pose a question: When we leave these objects to the earth what role will they play in its next evolution?