Karyn Johnstone: Contemporary Multidisciplinary Art and Sculpture

London-based multidisciplinary artist Karyn Johnstone explores the complex intersections of womanhood, domesticity, and social expectations through her artistic practice. Working across the disciplines of painting and sculpture, she draws on lived experience to confront the pressures placed on women to perform beauty and compliance. Her sculptural pieces often utilize found and domestic materials, which she reassembles to create visual tension between sexual objectification and domestic labor. Karyn Johnstone is heavily influenced by the decorative aesthetics of the Rococo and late Baroque periods, reclaiming these historical styles to address modern themes of control and endurance. Her art often seduces the viewer with surface beauty before revealing deeper, unsettling narratives regarding the female body and the male gaze. By interrupting traditional aesthetics with uncomfortable truths, Karyn Johnstone highlights the ongoing conflict between being a woman and performing femininity, creating a body of work that is both evocative and critical. Her practice often involves acts of disruption, breaking and reassembling objects once associated with care and ornament to expose the rigid roles women are expected to inhabit in contemporary society.