Review: Nerys Johnson: Disability and Practice
A vivid exhibition is brightening winter days at the Laing Art Gallery
A group of teenagers burst in when I was looking at Nerys Johnson’s paintings at the Laing Art Gallery.
“Oh, this is pretty,” one of them exclaimed, and she wasn’t looking at her mobile phone.
But soon they’d all whipped them out and were darting around taking photographs, which is what I’d been doing.
You’ll find it’s impossible to resist.
In Nerys’s obituary in The Guardian, the art critic Julian Spalding suggested that, in time, it would be her last pictures, her tiny portraits of single flowers, that would come to be most treasured.
Time has passed (Nerys died in 2001, aged 58 and after years of illness and painful operations) and on the evidence of this exhibition and this one encounter I’d say he was right.
The exhibition Nerys Johnson: Disability and Practice opened before Christmas and if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d say it’s worth making the effort (you’ll find it in the watercolour gallery which is a nice space but a little tucked away at the Laing).
Despite the debilitating arthritis which limited what she could do, Nerys was always sunny and outgoing.
Others have said so and that was my experience when I interviewed her about her pictures or met her at the DLI Museum and Art Gallery in Durham which she ran from 1970 to 1989.
Our last meeting was after she had recently returned from a painting trip to Venice with some friends and fellow artists who had helped her with her wheelchair (this excursion is amusingly documented).
If you have seen the exhibition already there’s now another incentive to return – a newly commissioned film from Surface Area Dance Theatre choreographed by New York-based Vangeline, specialist in the Japanese dance form known as butoh, and performed by Annie Dearnley, Ashling McCann, Christopher Fonseca and Jesse Salaman.
It’s called Down Amongst the Plants and it’s petite but perfectly formed, a bit like a late Nerys painting, especially when the dancers in their beautifully blossoming costumes are bathed in colour at the end.
The film runs on a loop with another by Sheila Graber who filmed Nerys painting at home in 1989, recording her love of flowers, her deft use of a brush and her happy, easy going nature.
Nerys came to the North East to study fine art at what is now Newcastle University but was then still King’s College, Durham. In 1968 she was appointed keeper of fine art at the Laing.
How appropriate, then, that this should be the venue for the exhibition curated in partnership with Rachel Boyd, a collaborative doctoral research student from Northumbria University.
Rachel has done a lovely job, pulling together paintings, sketches and prints from across Nerys’s career and augmenting them with treasured notebooks and photographs.
Many of the items on display are part of a large body of Nerys’s work donated to the Laing by her estate in November 2022.
In one cabinet is a pair of Nerys’s red orthopaedic shoes, one heel dramatically built up, and if that gives an idea of the obstacles she had to overcome, there’s another alongside it – a breathless 1970 newspaper account of her appointment as keeper of the DLI.
‘Woman heads staff at military museum’ gasps the headline over a report which points out that she was “preferred to men applicants” and (as if to underline the folly) that on being asked what she knew of military history, had replied: “Nothing.”
But she set out to learn and won any doubters over. Nerys’s obituary recalls some of the notable exhibitions she curated or secured for Durham during her time there and before early retirement through ill health enabled her to return to painting, which she loved.
You will find details of this and other exhibitions and events on the Laing Art Gallery’s website.
Nice review David, your third I think on Nerys Johnson? Really looking forward to seeing this exhibition. I hope the girls who photographed the paintings post them widely because Nerys's paintings deserve to be seen by a young audience who may not of heard of her before. I think the late flower paintings are very Instagrammable and I'm sure Nerys would have been posting if she were still around.