Johanna Love is an artist, academic and researcher living in London, UK. In 2022 she became Scienitifc Associate at the Natural History Museum, London. She is interested in making images that operate at the limits of human perception and often invoke ideas of the technological sublime, through print, drawing and photographic languages, often combining all together, using landscape and architectural subject matter, to generate unstable, shifting material surfaces, and visually complex and unfathomable images. Here, the fractured, open and complex images offer an arena within which we can contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality.
 

In 2013 she attained a PhD in the field of Fine Art at Chelsea college of Arts, with a thesis titled Dust: Exploring new ways of viewing the photographic printed image. Previous to this, she completed a fellowship in Printmaking at The Royal Academy Schools between 2001-5. She exhibits nationally and internationally; continues to contribute to key debates through exhibitions and international conferences and symposiums across fine art printmaking, drawing and photography contexts.

Over the last few years Johanna has been working in collaboration with senior scientists at Natural History Museum, London and the Interplanetary Sciences Archive at UCL. At the Natural History Museum Johanna works with Electronmicroscopy to examine samples of dust collected from her families old home in the centre of Hamburg, Germany. The house sits in the centre of Hamburg and withstood the intense bombing of WW2. Johanna's interests are in the dust as an archive of time and place; of history and memory; and also of the discord between the scientific image and human perception. She is currently making large-scale drawings to re-think and re- negotiate the scientific image and generate new readings of time, scale and weight.

Awards/Publications

2022  Awarded Scienitifc Associate status, Natural History Museum, London

2021   Tallin International Drawing Triennial Award Winner

2020 Love, Johanna (2020), ‘Drawing dust’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 5:2, pp. 193–208, doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00032_1

2018     Kunsterhaus Munchner International Lithografie Award, Munich, Germany

2018     Chance,V. & Ganley, D.(Eds) RE:PRINT. Marmalade: London.

2017     A New Vision of Printmaking (2017) Kuandu Museum of Fine Art.

2017     Love, J. (2017) Lichlose Luft: Lightless Air. London. Camberwell Press.

2015     Journal of Fine Art Practice ‘Somewhere between Printmaking, Photography and Drawing: Viewing contradictions within the printed image’.

2012     PhD Thesis British Library ‘Dust: Exploring new ways of viewing the printed photographic image’

2012     Grabado Y Edicion – Print and art edition Magazine.

2011     Featured artist, Aspiracje - Journal of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw

2009     Digital print award, 6^th Graphic Biennial – Novosibirsk State Museum, Russia

2008     Featured work Printmaking on a budget, A&C Black 2008

2007     The Elephant Trust Award, London

2004     Featured Artist Ambit Magazine                          

2003     RASAA Newsletter, issue 16                                            

1999     The Culford Press Award, London          

1998     The Yew Tree Studio Award      

Conference Papers

2020 Drawing Dust, Drawing Talking to Sciences International Conference, Lancaster University.

2018    Dust , Drawing and Time: Artist in Residence – Kloster Bentlage, Germany

2015    Somewhere between Printmaking, Photography and Drawing: Viewing contradictions within the printed image – Hybrid Practices in Printmaking Symposium, Chelsea College of Arts, London

2015    Dust: Exploring new ways of viewing the printed photographic image – Shadows: Material photography in a digital culture, PARC Symposium, LCC, London

2013    Dust: Exploring new ways of viewing the printed photographic image – Impact 8, Duncan of Jordanstone College, Dundee

2011    Materiality and surface of the digital print – Wrexham International print exhibition & Symposium, Yale College, Wrexham

2010    From the emptiness of representation to the representation of emptiness, Land/Water Symposium “Landscape & the Metaphysical”, The University of Plymouth

My research and supervisory interests are within the field of fine art, and interdisciplinary relationship across art and science; printmaking, drawing and the photographic image. In 2022 I was awarded Scientific Associate status at The Natural History Museum in London. In 2012 I completed a practice based PhD at Chelsea College of Art, questioning the perception of the photographic image in relation to manual drawing and the subject matter of dust. My research interests are around the areas of visual perception, technological and material image making, memory and time.