Johann's practice is diverse, multi-cultural and cross-disciplinary. She has been finalist and recepient of numerous awards nationally and internationally.
"I use a range of media in my practice. Drawing acts as a form of mapping new territory and personal navigation. I am interested in our perception of place, individually and collectively. My work is an ongoing enquiry about place and notions of home and belonging. The shifted physical space experienced during national lockdown and the world-wide pandemic crises brought new impulses to my work. A deceleration and intimate exploration of my immediate environment caused a shift in the way I felt connected. Observing places around me in ‘slow-motion’ has been my modus operandi, and seeing nature through an almost microscopic lens has been a forming experience; noticing edges and fringes. A new porousness that allowed me to un-peel and to re-construct layers of meaning in search for a new physicality.
Recent works are a response to an atmosphere of uncertainty, tectonic and environmental shifts. Beauty and wonder are undeniably all around us, but seem less visible in these testing times…everything feels affected by disruptions and is tirelessly fed by a flood of dystopian news. " I.Johann 2023
"Ina Johann is captivated with the experience of travel, and its mental corollary - search. Hers is an art of deliberate instability, which privileges the imaginative potential of those accidental stumblings-upon that happen in places not one's own, and the way the eye is attuned to possibility when elsewhere. Her vision is a travellers, aware of the creative potential of the peripheral, of the margin, aware of time, aware of the view's partiality. It cuts snippets of visual experience, often not particularly remarkable or notable, from the day's great unrolling reel, and frames them for the viewer. But there is a tension in their seeming-centrality, a feeling of drag, that any moment their layered, impressionistic palimpsests of visual data could be pulled back again into the great blind flow. Her development of ways in which to ground images while remaining open to drift has seen interests in screenprinting, photography, video, installation, audio and found archival images included among the formal and technical hand-luggage she carries."
Excerpt by Sally Ann McIntyre 2005
German born New Zealand artist Ina Johann lectured for a number of years both in New Zealand and Germany and is currently a full time practitioner living in Christchurch/New Zealand.