Artist Talk: Anna Johnson and Rachael Parsons on 'BAROMETRIC'

Join us for a lively discussion with artist Anna Johnson alongside special guest Rachael Parsons, Director of New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM) immersed alongside the paintings of BAROMETRIC, a solo exhibition by Anna Johnson at Eloise Cato Gallery on Saturday 26 September 2–3:30pm.

RSVP is essential, please book through Humanitix. For further information or to register your interest in the pricelist please get in touch directly at info@catogallery.com or by calling +61 403 902 498. 

Rachael Parsons is an Australian curator and arts professional who has been the Director of the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM) in Armidale since 2017. With a career spanning curatorial practice, arts management and exhibition development, Parsons has worked to create opportunities for artists and connect regional audiences with Australian art. During her time at NERAM, she has supported a diverse range of artists and exhibitions, including Anna Johnson, whose work was presented in the 2025 exhibition Nymphaea Nymphaea. Through her leadership, Parsons has contributed to NERAM’s role as an important cultural institution within the New England region.

Anna Johnson is an Australian artist whose practice is informed by an esteemed career in arts writing, authorship and criticism. Born in London and raised between Sydney and New York, Johnson spent her formative years in New York in the 1970s, immersed in the city’s influential art scene. Bringing decades of critical engagement with art into her studio practice, Johnson turned her full attention to painting in 2016, establishing a significant new chapter in an already distinguished career. She is represented by Kutlesa in New York and Goldau, Switzerland, and her work is held in major private collections with a blue-chip focus across Australia and internationally. Johnson’s work has been presented institutionally, including a solo exhibition at the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM), Armidale, in 2025 and her work will also be presented at Untitled Art, Miami Beach with Kutlesa, in December, marking an expansion of her international exhibition fair profile.

BAROMETRIC

Crossing the Pont du Carousel at dusk a vast body of cloud that looked like an inverted mountain hung low and dark over the rooftop of the Louvre. The gravity and scale of this sky formed a strong basis for the engulfing voids and convex architecture of Anna Johnson’s BAROMETRIC. Paintings that occupy space, where atmosphere becomes form and memory becomes material. A fusion of dissonant, almost impossible contrasts compressed into a single plane. Something heavy that is etheric. Something joyous dogged by shadow. Resisting the imposition of narrative upon abstraction, Johnson positions her paintings to function as energetically present. Although rooted in the afterimage of encounter, she transforms the emotional residue of memory into tangible, simplified forms that are not the sum of rendition but reverberations. Within the expansive language of abstract colour-field painting, Johnson’s works treat colour not as a surface, but as a force - one that can exert pressure to alter the psychological register of space. Expansive fields of pigment press against one another in chafing harmony, a continual shifting between containment and release, breath and exhale. Her pure colour offers a clearing within the claustrophobia of physical reality; in Johnson’s words, an ‘eye of a storm’.