Johan Hagaman

Although Johan Hagaman received a bachelor’s and a master’s in English from Indiana University, she began making art after a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, where she was inspired by the power, necessity, and transcendent nature of their art forms.  Johan is a mixed-media artist who uses concrete, paper, paint and found objects to create abstracted figures often ensconced in some form of nature: vines, birds, thorns—which has become a recurring metaphor in her work.  Her art draws on mythology and nature to explore how we shape ourselves and our world, and how we are shaped by it, and what seeks to emerge. The openings and open heads suggest vital space, vulnerability, and inward journey—a psychological enquiry into how we hold ourselves in the confluence of the forces of life: luck, fate, chance, and choice.