Michelle Lee Johnson
“I am very content with a polyvalent practice; it is a blessing to continue being surprised by where an idea leads to.”
Michelle Lee Johnson is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between sculpture, installation, and film to examine how systems shape emotion, behaviour, and belonging. In this interview, she discusses her polyvalent approach to making, the role of humour and affect in her work, and the ideas behind her recent projects exploring performance, surveillance, and public life.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
I went to an interdisciplinary studies school in undergrad, where, back in 2015, it was a fresh idea to academia, and I essentially designed my curriculum as a research-based arts practice; although at the time I was not aware of that being a “normal” process or even a recognised field in the arts. After graduating, I worked as a set designer in New York and LA. I’ve always been interested in place – you might call it site-specificity but sometimes it's also an interest in a liminal sense of place – and working in production scaled up my skill and confidence to develop installation-based sculpture and film. Creatively, set design provided unique challenges and material explorations that were almost addictive, but I couldn’t reconcile how wasteful it all felt; the labour, time, money, and actual trash that accumulate from every brand campaign, commercial, editorial, just for it to be cut to 4:5 aspect ratio as an Instagram reel to scroll past. I knew my soul needed to return to the slow thoughtfulness of my art practice. I ended up pursuing my masters at Goldsmiths, and the experience helped me to further understand how the research and making aspects of my practice mutually inform one another. Looking back, I experienced both polar ends of the spectrum to land where is best suited to me; somewhere more flexible to exist across it all.
Your work often shifts between sculpture, installation, and film, yet there’s a consistent focus on how systems shape our emotional and social lives. What connects these different strands of your practice?
I find every project needs approaching on its own terms. I am very content with a polyvalent practice; it is a blessing to continue being surprised by where an idea leads to. That sentiment has taken time to accept, largely due to growing a strong sense of trust in myself. I think that’s why I struggle to claim research-based, because I also follow intuition. I try to meet an idea wherever it is, responding to it with how to make in service of communicating that idea. I also have a strong sense of taste and a clear set of concerns, and so I believe it shows up across all the mediums I work in. I think, at its core, each variation connects under a fundamental question of belonging. Refining this process relied on and continues to involve the support from the people I love, who understand me and my practice. I’ve received plenty of guidance past the hurdle of: “does this make sense?”. It goes beyond nothing being made in a vacuum; creativity thrives amongst kin. One outcome of this community has opened up an on-going collaboration with my friend and artist Emilia González Salgado.
'be still,' 2024
'Jester 7,' 2024
Public Sentiment, 2024
In your film, a melancholic clown endlessly repeats a commute through public transit, a space that’s both collective and isolating. What interested you in using this character as a lens to explore performance, conformity, and shared emotion in public life?
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how affect shapes our attachments, whether to other people, belief systems, politics (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing on affect theory is especially influential here). The clown offers a very direct reference to our emotional lives, while also recalling a historical figure of public dissent; the jester who performs to power. An arguably queer figure, the clown in my film doesn’t fully inhabit any role; they aren’t quite a traditional clown, yet they also fail to present as the professional persona they attempt to perform. I wanted to capture that moment of feeling one amongst many, when individual inner lives can sometimes feel united in a shared public space, often felt most intensely collective during a protest. However, this sense of communion is complicated by an overt exhibitionism in the film, calling to a strange cultural coexistence of hypervisuality and severe isolation. How we might feel together or disconnected seems almost indistinguishable. The clown’s emotion cycles from playfulness through despondency and exhaustion to fleeting joy, echoing the rhythm of the daily commute. This looping trajectory becomes a metaphor for the affective dimensions of labour; its repetitive gestures, small performances of endurance, and moments of dissonant relief. In this endless moving circuit that demands performance, emotion becomes both expression and constraint.
Humor and irony appear throughout your work, often alongside themes of alienation and control. How do you see tone functioning, as a way to create distance, provoke reflection, or invite empathy?
It’s a good question, and I might not have a conclusive answer. I think, at least in part, we live in absurd times, and humor and irony are useful operational modes to recognise the deceptive quality of extractive and exploitative systems. I would never want to come across as trivialising; rather, I look to disarm a viewer to be open to the tonal shifts present in the work. Humor can be uniting, and irony is critical without being didactic. There are discrete moments of manipulation or questions of consent in my work, especially around my interest in surveillance. I hope the provocation is reflection, operating as a mirror to our inevitable participation in structures of power or alienation. Ultimately, I think it comes down to a question of whether its function can be attributed to my intention or its reception, so I’m always interested to hear from a viewer how it reads.
'force with no net sum' in collaboration with Emilia González Salgado, 2025
'Judas hole,' 2025. Image Credit: Amelie Mckee
'Judas hole,' 2025. Image Credit: Amelie Mckee
UL11, UL12, X, UL14, 2023
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
I prefer an early start to the studio and I need my space to be organised, or at least arranged where I know where everything is. I am usually working on a few separate projects in various stages at once, so the day could be planned for research or material development, and unfortunately likely some admin too. Once I start constructing a piece, I will stay working until late into the night and continue ceaselessly until fabrication is done. I know I can become quite obsessive, which I counteract by pacing myself to allow for the ideas first to evolve over time, as they need. An artist during a studio visit advised me to place new ideas somewhere you can always return to, and where you can leave them to be unresolved until the timing is right. The epiphanies always arrive through passive thinking for me, so I try to spend time in my day under conditions that naturally facilitate processing my thoughts. I find walking operates as an extension of my studio; I take a lot of photo references of what I pass on the street and I am building the habit of writing down ideas right as they come to me. I enjoy reading during commutes — currently captivated by Sean Ashton’s ‘MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK’ — since I find the hum of a bus or train helps my brain focus. Wherever I am, I keep attentive to my surroundings; that willingness to engage produces a lot of unexpected pleasure.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
Karimah Ashadu’s solo exhibition ‘Tendered’ at Camden Art Centre is an exceptional show. Most notably ‘MUSCLE’ struck me for its multisensory balance of softness and precision; an approach I find profoundly aspirational. I’m drawn to filmic practices like Ashadu’s that situate themselves in proximity to a subject or a story rather than attempting to explain for it; what filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha describes as “not speaking about, just speaking nearby.” Her works are intentionally not documentaries – for many critical reasons – operating instead with an acute awareness of the filmmaker’s position and a refusal to occupy the place of authority that role can afford. I also appreciate how Ashadu foregrounds the physicality of the moving image, both in how the films are installed in space, how she manipulates the camera in her films, and how she uses sound to immerse the viewer. The result is an experience that feels both intimate and expansive, grounded in empathy yet aware of the structures that shape how we see.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I will be releasing an artists’ book in December with my collaborator Emilia González Salgado as a continuation of our exhibition from this past summer. I’ve enjoyed returning to text and drawing as a part of the process, especially since I currently work full time. It is the not-so-glamorous reality of great opportunities, like the exhibitions and residencies I was fortunate to experience this year; you’re forced to make up for the time by rebuilding your financial subsistence. However, I’m very excited for some of those funds to go towards production of a film I’ve been developing for over two years now. I aim to start shooting in the late winter, so the film is planned for release in mid 2026.
All images courtesy of the artist
Interview publish date: 20/11/2025
Interview by Richard Starbuck
