Karyn Johnstone

Karyn Johnstone is a London based multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the contradictions of womanhood, where desire, domesticity, strength, and vulnerability collide under social expectation. Rooted in lived experience, her practice confronts the pressures placed on women to perform care, beauty, sexuality, and compliance, often simultaneously.
​
Working across painting and sculpture, Johnstone uses each discipline to inform the other. Her sculptural works are constructed from found and domestic materials, objects once associated with care, order, or ornament, which she breaks, binds, and reassembles. These acts of disruption create a visual tension between female sexual objectification and domestic labour, exposing the rigid roles women are expected to inhabit.
​
Her work often seduces before it unsettles. Drawing on decorative aesthetics and surface beauty, Johnstone invites the viewer in, then reveals the fractures beneath. Sugar-coated forms sit alongside darker narratives of constraint, control, and endurance, questioning the masks women are taught to wear and the ways the female body is framed and consumed through the male gaze.
​
Influenced by Rococo and late Baroque art, periods marked by ornament, femininity, and ...