'From Her Body' features cyanotype on fiber and bronze sculpture at HACC-Lancaster Campus art show

Feb. 11, 2011

LANCASTER – Opposites come together March 1-April 14 at the Art Space in the East Building of the HACC-Lancaster Campus, 1641 Old Philadelphia Pike.

“From Her Body” features cyanotype on fiber and the bronze sculptures by Judith Johnson, adjunct humanities instructor for HACC’s Lancaster and Virtual campuses and coordinator of the Art Space.

An artist’s reception will be held 5:30-7 p.m. Wednesday, March 16.

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Historically engineers used the method as a simple and low-cost process that allowed them to produce large-scale reproductions of their work, referred to as blueprints. Johnson uses the cyanotype photographic process to print images onto fabric.

A bronze casting class sparked Johnson’s interest and she spent most of 2010 working on sculptures for the show. Ladling bronze that was more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit into sculpted sand became the vehicle for casting for all the sculptures in this exhibit.

“The immediate process of actually drawing with the molten bronze allowed me to create linear figures in dance and movement,” said Johnson. “The blue-green patina symbolically conveys the figures’ emergence from the water and earth.”

Johnson considers the juxtaposing of the hard, organic crudeness of the bronze sculptures, a masculine principle, with the soft, rhythmic, decorative cyanotypes on fiber, a feminine principle, plays an important role in this installation.

“The Jungian concept of the union of opposites has been in my work since 1992 when I first became an artist. This striving for the integration of universal forces – a search for physical wholeness - compels my artist search,” she said.

Johnson is an alumna of HACC and also has her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in humanities from Penn State Harrisburg.

Recent juried and invitational exhibits she has participated in include the Salvage Show at Franklin and Marshall College, Preservation Show, Keystone Art & Culture Center in Lancaster, and the Figurative Show at Elizabethtown College.

The exhibit is free and open to the public. Art Space hours are 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday.

For more information contact Judith Johnson, at 717-358-2201 or e-mail jcjohnso@hacc.edu.