Gail-Nina Anderson looks forward to a new exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, which celebrates the life and work of local artist and curator Nerys Johnson.

The moment I encountered Nerys Johnson’s idiosyncratic watercolours I fell in love with them, though I didn’t immediately connect them with the rather spiky, outspoken little woman who I knew of through her role as Keeper of Fine Art at the Laing Art Gallery (later going on to become Keeper in Charge of the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Arts Centre). She had studied art at Newcastle University’s Dept of Fine Art, and had certainly made an impact there. In local artistic circles everyone who had met her or seen her work remembered her, sometimes rather ruefully, citing her high standards and fierce determination to follow her own path, mentioning with regret that the severe rheumatoid arthritis from which she suffered was increasingly limiting her mobility, but always adding that her art was remarkable.

A swift, factual summing-up might not make it sound so – lady who works in arts administration producing small watercolours, often flowers or views. That’s where the transformative visual energy comes in. Watercolour can certainly be a delicate, understated medium, a fadingly discreet veil of colour on a sheet of paper, traditionally deemed suitable as an accomplishment for the sort of refined females one might encounter in a Jane Austen novel. In Johnson’s hands it was more like an explosion. Of course, it was a carefully controlled explosion, which in its very energy hinted at the level of skill a good watercolour requires. Paper is absorbent, a water-based medium will spread, every brush-stroke counts and it really isn’t simply a matter of just colouring neatly inside the outlines – especially when you’ve abandoned those outlines anyway. When she drew her lines were expressive and considered, but when she painted an outrageous sense of colour took over, pulsing with a visual power that took no prisoners. Good watercolour is never flat, as the paint/paper interface creates tonal variations and subtleties, nuances that can translate a deceptively simple depiction of freesias against a black background, or one of purple irises against orange, into visual fireworks. Particularly interested in growth, movement and states of change, with a long-term consideration of the parallels between human and plant forms, she came to imbue even her street scenes and studies of architecture with a sense of shifting energy through her use of colour. In 1994 she won an artistic residency in Venice, at a period when her worsening health increasingly necessitated working predominantly from home. During this residency, Johnson was assisted by artists Joy Batt, Decia Morris, and Susie Balasz, who worked to support Johnson in navigating the city alongside developing their own artistic practices. She liked to refer to this adventure as ‘Three Lady Artists and a Wheelchair,’ revealing the joy and community they all found during this time. The resultant art works, though, reveal it even more clearly, with their glimpses of a city dissolved and reformed by light and water, where striped awnings and canal-side buildings reflect a jewel-like colour scheme. The magic didn’t only happen in Venice, however – my personal favourite must be a study of the massive pillars of Durham Cathedral, covered with Romanesque zig-zag decorations that have magically been washed in dazzling tones, as though light through the building’s stained glass windows had transferred their colours by dissolving all material barriers.

Johnson died in 2001, and in 2022 a large body of her work was donated to the Laing Art Gallery by the Estate of Nerys Johnson, an archive comprising  thousands of works on paper, including sketchbooks, prints, and watercolours, dating from throughout her artistic career.  From this collection the gallery has curated a new, free entry exhibition, “Nerys Johnson: Disability and Practice”, which opens on 21 December 2024.

As part of the exhibition, the Laing Art Gallery has commissioned Surface Area Dance Theatre, a live performance organisation that works at the interface between sign language, D/deaf culture, and dance, to develop and produce a performance to camera in response to the Nerys Johnson archive. Titled “Down Amongst the Plants”. This pays tribute to the artist’s engagement with the rhythms of nature through Butoh, a form of Japanese dance. The choreographer of the performance, Vangeline, is the artistic director of the internationally acclaimed New York Butoh Institute, based in New York, USA.

Nerys Johnson: Disability and Practice, from 21 December, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. laingartgallery.org.uk