Helen Johnson

Women’s work (1902) 2017

Melbourne-based artist and writer Helen Johnson’s hanging, large-scale, double-sided paintings are a response to two important works by female artists in the Australian collection: AME Bale’s Leisure moments 1902, and Vida Lahey’s Monday morning 1912. Both paintings from the 1900s depict women in interior spaces. Johnson’s contemporary works position them in the context of the political and social framework of the years they were painted.

Bale’s painting is thought to represent the artist with fellow students in her studio on a break. Johnson has also positioned herself and her two studio assistants, Georgina Sambell and Nell Pearson, as the three female figures in her own painting, bringing the studio context into the present day.

The Brisbane General Strike of 1912, the same year Lahey’s Monday morning was painted, was a defining episode in the history of workers’ rights in Queensland. During her research, Johnson was fascinated by this significant event and its relation to Lahey’s depiction of domestic labour.

On the reverse of her paintings, Johnson has incorporated various historical elements, including a sketch of a second-class diploma that Bale received in 1907 in the ‘First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work’, and an account of the workers’ strike in which Emma Miller, a woman in her 70s, stabbed the police commissioner’s horse in the rump with her hat pin.