About Rose
Rose is an artist and counselor exploring interbeing, fear, and joy through painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. She earned an MFA in studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before attaining an MA in Counseling and Psychological Services from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.
Rose creates art related to the experiences of children. She feels it is important to speak of both the joys and the unspoken pain of children. Snapshots found in the work reference a child's experience of violence, worries, shame, and longing. Rose's artwork rests at the tipping point between joy, purity, and vulnerability found only within a child.
As an artist and helper, Rose trusts the youthful experiences of aimlessness, play, and mess-making as antidotes to pain and suggests that they are integral to life. Making is a mess. Mess is letting go. Letting go is transformation.
For Rose, the quickest route to playfulness is to use materials and processes that can be guided rather than controlled. She gravitates toward working with large-scale items and industrial materials often related to domestic spaces. Through manipulation of objects and materials, spaces shift from beautiful and calm to dark and unsafe and back again. Like a worn and broken toy cherished by a child, like the human heart, the artwork simultaneously breaks down and evolves.
A body produces its own pressure.
Pressure pumps blood fast through the heart,
keeps the body alive when threatened.
Stop, wrap a scarf tightly around the chest.
Now pressure comes from the scarf.
From outside rather than within.
The body is released.
Inhale. Exhale. You are free.
Everyone has trauma.
Here is my scarf.
Catching the Spark
Every child carries a spark. Something alive, creative, and entirely their own. It's in there no matter what they're going through or how they're showing up right now.
A lot of growing up is learning to follow the rules, to subvert yourself to whatever is expected. For kids who are also carrying stress, trauma, or pain, that spark can get buried under a lot of weight. But it doesn't go out.
I don't see children as things that need to be fixed or fit into a mold. Sometimes what a child has inside of them is more important than what's expected of them by their environment. My job is to pay attention, to really study the child, and to catch that spark when it shows itself. And then to tend it carefully, so it can grow.
That's what catching the spark means. It's the moment in the studio when something shifts. When a child who's been guarded starts to open up, when the materials give them a way to say what they couldn't say before, when you can see them beginning to flow. It's the heart of this work, and it's why the studio exists.
Credentials
Education
- Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC)
- Master of Fine Arts — School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Master’s degree, Counseling and Psychological Services — Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota
Select Exhibitions
- Minneapolis Institute of Art (Solo Exhibition)
- Kathryn Nash Gallery
- Chicago Urban Arts Society
- Fernway Gallery
- Highpoint Center for Printmaking
Grants & Residencies
- Jerome Foundation Residency
- Acres Residency
- Oxbow Residency
Continuing Development
Trained directly under a pioneer in the field of embodied drama therapy, with four years of clinical mentorship and practice. Ongoing professional development in arts-based therapeutic approaches, embodied creative process, and improvisational methods in psychotherapy.
View Rose's studio art practice at rosesexton.com
Selected work by Rose Johnson
