Creators, Makers, & Doers: Clare Johnson
Posted on 12/4/24 by Brooke Burton
Interview & Photography by Brooke Burton for Boise City Department of Arts & History; © Clare Johnson
Clare Johnson, fall 2023 resident at the James Castle House, is an artist and author whose visual work includes pen and ink drawing, painting, and a ritual of jotting down quick thoughts and sketches onto Post-it notes (hundreds!) as a way to close out a day. Their writing is a mix of genres: fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; something she likes to think of as hybrid form. And, exciting news! Clare has been named co-editor of the Washington State Poet Laureate’s queer poetry anthology. Her writing has also been recently published through an app called TrailOff that connects storytelling to environment through the use of a smartphone and GPS. During their time with us, we had the joy of listening to Clare thoughtfully reflect on the complexity of gender identity, on taking time for inner work, and on their journey into making meaningful public art. In her process, Clare chooses to personally connect with people who have difficult but important stories to tell, such as survivors of the AIDS pandemic, and those affected by homelessness in her home city of Seattle. What does it take to create in this way? A willingness to both feel and dive deeply, a gift Clare shared with us.
Your work spans many disciplines; you draw, paint, and write. Tell me about your Post It Notes, are they a diary?
They’re a record of my life in real time, one night at a time for over 15 years [now 16+] so far. In grad school, I started making a drawing on a Post‑it note every night before I went to bed, meant to hold onto something from each day as it’s ending. Then stemming from those Post-it notes, I started making black‑and‑white drawings that are really intricate. The [ink drawings] are often imaginary imagery; it can be based on something I’m thinking about from real life, but I make it up while I’m doing it. There are certain scenes I found myself always wanting to draw every night in the Post-its, so the ink drawings let me dive into those more. Most of the time, they are tiny and square, kind of like Post-its. Every now and then, I make a gigantic [ink drawing], but with the same tiny details. I can’t make a new big one until the current one sells, that’s my rule for myself, because the last really big drawing was in progress on my drafting table for two years! And then when it’s finished and framed, it’s so hard to store. So I only do that every now and then. They get mistaken for prints, but they’re drawn by hand.
The texture looks like it was carved on a printmaking block.
Because I don’t use grayscale.
That’s what it is! Is this like the work you are doing for public art?
Yes, but for public art projects I add color. Those start with black‑and‑white drawings, which I then make into prints on watercolor paper, then hand‑color with watercolor paints. Last, the watercolor versions get enlarged into a public art piece.
What kind of locations are they installed?
So far, it’s all been local and the greater Seattle area. Most of them have been temporary, and a lot of them explore community histories. There’s one about HIV and family that was attached to the AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle—actually in my neighborhood. It was very exciting. That’s the only one where I really had a hard time with it being just temporary. I got very attached to it, personally. It was based on my interviews with four long‑term survivors.
Public art was a real dream of mine for so long—it still is. I would love to do permanent projects [since this interview, Johnson’s first permanent mural has now been completed, around the entrance of DESC’s Bloomside, a permanent supportive housing building in Burien, WA]. I love that everybody can experience public art for free, but the artist also gets paid. Public art is part of normal life; you don’t have to intentionally go to this rarefied, special space, you just encounter it walking through your ordinary day. That, to me, makes it special and more personal. It can also make space for connection without ever meeting. It’s very unlikely that I would meet a stranger on the street in my neighborhood and feel comfortable being like, “Hey, let me tell you about HIV history and the AIDS crisis here.”
No, you probably wouldn’t. [Laughter.]
But with public art there’s an opportunity to be intimate with each other without knowing each other. Of course, I don’t know anything about the person who’s looking at it unless they reach out to me. I just have to trust that that’s happening.
Trust that you’re putting a message out there, and people in their own time can respond to it? Trust that you’re reaching audiences outside of institutions, and hope that they interact or benefit from your work in some way?
Yes, exactly. And it can mean different things to different people. I understand some people will never read the words [on the piece] that make it very clear what the art is about. Some people will just look at the bright colors and enjoy it as part of the landscape. Kids will look up close and find toy dinosaurs drawn in, and that will be fun for them, which is also important! So, I love public art. At the same time, the reality of making drawings for public art is a huge information‑gathering process that, in some cases, can be very emotional for me. I can get very invested, and that can be difficult.
The process brings up pain or discomfort?
Yes, especially because the histories I’m looking at are often from communities that are going through a tough time. In Seattle, there’s lots of tiny house villages for people transitioning out of homelessness. One of my first projects was with one of those communities. It can be really emotional to look up close at what people are going through and then try to translate that into art. And after that, there’s often a very hefty planning and approvals process.
To check in with stakeholders?
Exactly, you have to plan everything out and get it approved before you actually make it. And I’m making these drawings based on other people’s experiences. It’s an interesting challenge, but I did so many of those in a row, like, boom, boom, boom—a lot of them simultaneously, overlapping at the edges. It meant no time or space for work that had anything to do with the moment I was in.
You were invested in telling other people’s stories, but you also need time to invest in your own story?
Yeah, a big part of my work is processing personal stuff and giving myself a place to put things, things that I don’t have a place for otherwise.
Inside your brain or heart or body or spirit?
Yeah. And many of these projects were all happening during the [Covid19] pandemic. With the AIDS Memorial art, I was immersing myself in local history around the AIDS pandemic—a pandemic that is very personal to me, to my community—right as Seattle was suddenly the epicenter of this new other pandemic. You know, all of it was way too real.
That’s heavy.
It was wonderful to have work during that time, I mean, it got me through the pandemic when other artists were unable to exhibit—[for me] it was work, work, work.
You were busy!
And I’m grateful for that, but I also realize now how much had been waiting in the wings with my own personal work.
And your personal life.
That too. I really kept it together, but my apartment did not keep itself together. [Laughter.]
Life comes in waves that way.
I’ve had quite a few of them, also during that time we were being told my mom was gonna die—she’s doing really well now, thank goodness. All that to say, while I’m here in Boise, I’m excited to take a note from James Castle and do whatever I feel needs to be communicated at this moment.
Something that serves your inner voice, rather than serving a community?
Well, rather than a project organized around a set theme, dictated by outside factors. I do think people can connect with art even when it’s personal. There’s lots of inroads for empathy—recognizing shared experience, or being intrigued by the mystery of someone else’s experience. That happens a lot when people look at my Post‑its. It’s a mixture of, “Oh my gosh, I’ve felt exactly this same way before,” or, “I wonder what she’s talking about?” Or, “What a weird combo of words. It doesn’t mean anything to me, but it’s making me laugh.” People bring their own meaning. Anyway, I’m excited to have time to address things that I haven’t for a while.
You also write?
Yes. I think of my writing as very similar to my paintings, even though they rarely interact with each other. It has a lot to do with memory and history, also family history. Probably all of my work is inspired by place as well. Place sends me—usually, place sends me to a million other places and into a million other times. A lot of my writing is actually a whole bunch of intersecting voices and times that are all interacting with each other, but not necessarily the same person, not necessarily the same time. Somebody described it like a core sample. It’s like I’m in this place now and all the times from this place are happening at once.
You’ve pulled up a core sample a mile deep but an inch wide of your personal history?
A lot of times it’s my personal history, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s imagined histories. Part of my writing tends to try and imagine queer histories that have been lost or forcibly erased, which is a big thing with gay and queer history. People are still being actively obscured in their queerness. Lots of famous people from history, of course. There can be really clear evidence that is still not talked about.
Oh I bet!
I was reading a book called Outlaw Marriages about famous gay couples, queer power couples, really, from American history. It’s amazing how many I still didn’t know about as a grown-up. Also, so many Hollywood stars from other eras. I watched a lot of old movies when I was little and definitely the first time I saw footage of Marlene Dietrich, or Greta Garbo, I recognized something without realizing it. Even so, it’s just not talked about in the larger world of cinematic history. There’s a documentary about a guy who is recounting his own life, living in the vicinity of Hollywood at that time. He talked about Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy both being gay, but their families disputed it. And even now, my emotions are anxious talking about this, like “will I get in trouble for saying someone was gay?”
So the question is, who’s telling the truth, who’s not, and why?
Right. Anyway, my writing is not generally about film stars. They’re just an easy example of erasure.
“Forcibly erased,” that makes me sad. It’s good to acknowledge that.
You hear things from family histories, both my own and other people’s, where you think, “That sounds really, really queer. That person could have been queer.” But that part of family lore isn’t there, you just have to imagine.
Because the verbal or oral history that’s passed down does not use any indicators; it’s avoided or there’s an absence of?
If a person is famous, that side of them is actively hidden, erased, destroyed. I mean, Emily Dickinson’s letters, I think many of them were destroyed, if I remember correctly. And certainly when things were first published by her—
Emily Dickinson was gay?
Well, I mean, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. You can’t say how somebody identified for themselves, in their private heart, or what word they would use for themselves. But there’s a lot of strong evidence that Emily Dickinson was in love with her sister‑in‑law. It’s being talked about more openly now. I’m not an expert on Emily Dickinson, but my understanding is when she was first published posthumously, it was edited heavily, to fit conventions but maybe partly to get rid of anything that would have suggested that. And in her case, she actually stipulated herself that most of her letters be burned. Family members would do this, people in power who were publishing, all these ways in which queerness was actively erased from someone’s history. People who were not famous, or didn’t have money, were often trying to hide themselves as well.
Hiding in order to not suffer negative reactions?
Generally, we would always have been hiding for safety. But even in instances where people were powerful or privileged or lucky enough to be living the way they wanted, history tends to cover over it, ignore it. The books I have here, you’ll notice, are a weird mixture: I have some fiction in the bedroom, but the stuff that’s in my little writing corner is a lot of queer history, and some Idaho history, and some London history. There are people in those books who have now been reclaimed by history, but were at risk of being lost.
Anne Lister wrote extensive diaries in England. She was wealthy as a landowner, in a very unusual situation, where the male heir, I think it was her father, was passed over. She became the heir instead because she was seen as more capable by the family. She wrote detailed journals, everything she did, every day. The parts that were lesbian were [written] in code, and it wasn’t decoded until much later. A century later, the family considered disposing of them. It’s incredibly lucky for people like me that those [diaries] survived, and it’s incredibly improbable. You don’t know how many other queer people there were, where the evidence didn’t survive. Except in some cases in arrest records.
Families would dispose of evidence, because in their minds, it would somehow be better, easier.
Or the people themselves weren’t wealthy enough to have the time to write a journal every night, so it’s all beneath notice. You can’t find it in history.
Then for me, how do you identify yourself?
My own identity? My favorite word for myself is dyke, but I realize that sounds different when different people say it, so you can also say lesbian or queer or gay. Genderqueer is another aspect for me.
It depends on who’s saying it.
Yeah, a straight person who’s not close to me saying “dyke” might be more of a slur. But dyke is my favorite self-descriptor, to use myself.
Is your writing considered memoir or nonfiction or fiction or—?
You have no idea how apt that question is! Now people call it hybrid form; it has a narrative, but it’s not a linear, typical kind of narrative. It’s fragmented, and all the little pieces together form meaning, but it doesn’t go in a typical narrative direction the way fiction or memoir would. It has elements of poetry, and includes some history, some fiction, some memoir. Sometimes it gets lumped under poetry, but I call it hybrid writing.
You have family in Idaho. Do you have roots here as well?
My mom was born in Long Valley, raised in Boise. And her mother, my grandmother, was also from Long Valley. Most of that side of the family has ended up in Boise and surrounding areas, but there’s still a couple of people up in Donnelly.
When did you know you were going to be an artist as a career?
I always wanted to be an artist since my earliest memories, but I didn’t know how anybody makes it work—and I still don’t, exactly, know how you make it work. Even in art school, grad school, you hope to get a little guidance. And there was none. No one could tell you. I’ve taken it upon myself when I talk to other artists. I probably give them too much information. All I can share is how I ended up here, and it’s kind of long and messy. It also involves me sharing things like, you know, if you’re in Seattle you should really know about the utility discount program.
There’s a part of your personality that is a reference librarian. You have the information stored on your memory shelves in order to be pulled up when the topic comes up.
[Laughing.] I haven’t thought of myself that way, but it could be, for sure. There’s the million little projects that you decided to take even though they didn’t pay much. But you did the rule of three, and it was two out of three. We’re all still learning!
What’s the rule of two out of three?
Lots of artists talk about things this way, so I can’t claim credit for it, but I think we all intuitively get to this. With every project or job you consider taking on, there’s three categories. There’s artistic development or interest; there’s exposure or career progression; there’s money. If a project you’re being asked to do only meets one of those, you have to look real hard at why you’re doing it.
That is such a good rule of thumb.
But if it meets two, that’s probably okay. No, it doesn’t pay, but it is exposure, and I want to do it artistically. Or if it’s exposure but it doesn’t pay, and it doesn’t make sense artistically for you, then no. Sometimes, you need to take something for pay. I cleaned the bathrooms at the studio for years and years and years, and that was not for exposure; it was just for pay. [Laughing.] But, yeah.
Sometimes you have to evaluate the exposure as well. Is it the type of exposure you want or need? Is it with people who excite you and that you feel good around? I had to turn down a project where the exposure was great, but I didn’t feel great working with them. So I went for something with less pay and less exposure because I loved working with the people.
It can be more nuanced than just the two out of three. But we all like to share that with people who are just starting out, because it can clarify something for them as they approach work opportunities.
Does repetition play a role in your work?
I think you can see it across all of my work. In my writing, I repeat certain words across several pieces in ways that become more meaningful as they overlap. I think it can also be very meaningful in writing to repeat something and then slightly change it. I also appreciate repetition in my process. I like to draw the same thing over and over again.
Exactly. The pattern here is a shape, very tiny, repeated over and over again. The Post‑it notes are a daily repetition.
There is something about repetition that is very holding. There’s also something wonderful about using it as a creative constraint that you can push against. To know when to push, and when to be held. I was thinking about James Castle’s work while I was in the archives, because I saw how many times he did the exact same thing over and over. But it’s not exactly the same, even though they are all the same size, same material, same shapes, slightly different colors. And there’s hundreds, maybe more. It’s a wonderful reminder that if something is important [enough] for me to do, it is important [enough] to do it over and over again, and that’s okay. There’s imagery that I want to draw over and over again. I want to draw tree houses over and over again.
Why do you think that is?
It’s creating a space that is filled with possibility and strangeness and a little bit like creating a fortress for yourself, but I don’t have to worry about the real‑life constraints—how you would get there or where your friends live.
Is it a form of self‑comfort?
Yes, definitely. The black‑and‑white drawing stuff dates back to what I liked to draw as a kid. I really liked creating detailed homes. I liked creating things where you could see all the rooms inside a tree trunk or under a tree, or creating a space that looked like no one could get to it, even though connection is important to me. I want to be around people, but also having that kind of impenetrable space feels important to me too. I have a very permeable skin, as it were. Big feelings. Other people’s feelings get into me. It’s hard to know how to get them out once they’re in. So, drawing those kinds of spaces is a reflection of that. It is comforting to live in those spaces while I’m up close to the paper and making them. And I think there’s also something soothing about even just the feel of the pen on paper.
Yes and the sound. Looking at the little nib, it’s so small. It must make a very tiny scratchy sound when you draw. What is something you are proud of?
I’m proud that I’ve managed to get to the point of getting public art projects.
Like you said, there’s no clear path to being a professional artist.
Yes, and I make small handmade things; it was really hard to convince anybody that it could be public art, even though I felt certain it could be, and would be good, meaningful public art. There are several times in my career where I’d applied and been rejected over and over; one of those is public art, another was residencies; but once it did finally happen, it has worked out many times. I’m also proud of coming back to painting while I’m here! It’s been years since I’ve had time and the right physical space to paint. But thinking about what specific project I’m proud of on a bigger scale, I am so proud of the public art I did for the AIDS Memorial Pathway [a temporary project for The AMP, Cal Anderson Park’s reservoir gatehouse, Seattle, 2021-2022].
Why was having your artwork part of the AIDS Memorial Pathway special to you?
I have multiple personal connections that make it very meaningful to me, some private, some about HIV and the queer community, some more general. I walk by that park all the time, it’s in the neighborhood I grew up in, the neighborhood I still live in. I literally said to friends in the past—multiple times!—“My art would be so good here, I wish the City of Seattle would call me up and ask me to put my art in those windows!” And that’s what happened! I was in Memphis at a residency, my phone rang, it even said “City of Seattle”. It was my first really big public art project; I made fourteen interlinked pieces about HIV and family. I interviewed three long-term [AIDS] survivors and one surviving family member of an artist who’d died during the height of the AIDS pandemic, in 1995, right before the meds started to get better. Privately, he was my fifth-grade art teacher—I interviewed his ex-wife; they were still close after he came out and they divorced. Doing that public art is what enabled me to finally figure out who he was, after years of remembering him but not knowing how to find out anything about him.
Wow. The world is small and strange sometimes.
All told, I made work that I was really proud of. It meant a lot to me personally, and it also seemed to mean a lot to other people while it was up. It was a dream come true.
James Castle House
December 4, 2024
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Creators, Makers, & Doers highlights the lives and work of Boise artists and creative individuals. Selected profiles focus on individuals whose work has been supported by the Boise City Dept. of Arts & History. The views are those of the individuals.