The collage-based artistic practice of Swedish artist Jenny Johansson (*1982) encompasses various mediums, including sculpture, painting, video, and music. Her work interrogates material hierarchies and folk traditions, marked by a DIY ethos and critical reflections on time, labor, and myth. Johansson’s compositions possess a poetic quality, deliberately contrasting divergent ideas to open new conceptual spaces for rethinking identity and memory, while intertwining craft and digital technologies. (Text: Livia Klein, 2024)
Since 2018, she has developed works known as technostones, derived from technofossil, which refers to the traces humans leave on Earth and in space. Like a stonemason or tattooist, she “sticks and pokes” images and text collages using a BBQ stick, creating inscriptions in insulation boards. This time-consuming relief craft, made from XPS cell plastic—often used in highway constructions, house foundations, and sports stadiums, with a durability of over 400 years—aims to foster reflection. The technostones can be seen as contemporary runes, hunger stones, or massive oil paintings that bear witness to the temporalities of existence, where the present, past, and future coexist.