JAMES JORDAN JOHNSON

1997, Born in London, UK

Forthcoming
2025 James Jordan Johnson & Ma Pak Yin, Harold Offeh Commission, Somerset House, London (UK) 
2025 - Sound Performance, A___Z (Anne Duffau), Resonance FM, Horse Hospital, London (UK)
Current
2025 - 2026 New Contemporaries Studio Residency at FormaHQ, London (UK)
2025 - 2026 A Caribbean Yet to Come, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto, Puerto Rico (PR)
Residencies
2024 High House Residency, Norfolk, (UK)  
2020 Toynbee Studio’s, Arts Admin, London (UK) 
2018 The Rising, ]performance s p a c e[, Folkestone (UK) 
2018 The Courtauld Institute of Art, London (UK) 
Group Exhibitions/Performances/ Screenings
2025 James Jordan Johnson & Ma Pak Yin, House of Anneta, London (UK)
2025  James Jordan Johnson & Ma Pak Yin, Duets, ICA (UK)
2024 Dead Lef: Visions of Contemporary Jamaica Vol.2, Ritzy Cinema, London (UK) 
2023 Miles Greenberg, Water in a Heatwave, MIA Institute, Southbank Centre, London (UK) 
2022 Crate Space, People Dem Collective, Margate (UK) 
2022 Tiding, ]performance s p a c e[, Romney Marsh (UK) 
2021 A Decade of Performance Art in the UK, Folkestone (UK)
2021 Working Encounters, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck (AT) 
2019 Collective Intimacy, The Showroom x 180 The Strand, London (UK) 
Solo Exhibitions/Performances
2025 Fish Bone in Thumb, Cabinet Closed, London Performance Studios, London (UK)
2024 Something is Trying to Disappear Me, Diaspora Now, Humber St Gallery (UK) 
2023 Late at Tate Britain: Desire, Culture and History (UK) 
2023 In Response, Constellation of Multiple Wishes, Mosaic Rooms, London (UK) 
2023 Something is Trying to Disappear Me, Ugly Duck, London (UK) 
2023 Something is Trying to Disappear Me, Buzzcut Festival, Glasgow (UK) 
2021 Something is Trying to Disappear Me, Ark-T, Oxford (UK)
2021 Something is Trying to Disappear Me, Arts Admin, London (UK) 
2019 Heads Up, CLAY, Leeds (UK) 
2019 My Brother’s Keeper, Tempting Failure, Croydon (UK)
Commissions
2022 Working Encounters, Create to Connect Create to Impact (SRB) 
2021 In The Hour of Darkness, Estuary Festival, Essex (UK)
Media
2022 Joy Inside Our Tears, Harold Offeh and conversation with project contributors, Wellcome Collection (UK)
2021 Do You Remember The Floorboards? An online talk with Bri Williams (UK) 
2020 James Jordan Johnson in conversation with Róise Goan, Arts Admin, London (UK) 
2016 Lament, Performance, TEDx Talk, London (UK) 
Teaching, Talks & Workshops
2024 Mapping Movements and Personal Cartographies Workshop, Bow Arts (UK) 
2024 The Conch, South London Gallery (UK) 
2022 Artist Lecture, Margate Art School (UK) 
2021 Theatre Arts, Middlesex University, London (UK)
Education
2024 - 2025  MA Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art (UK)
2021 - 2022 Open School East, Margate (UK)
Awards
2024 Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship, Royal College of Art, London (UK) 
2022 Venice Fellowship Programme, Venice Biennale (IT) 
2022 Metroland Cohort: Peer-To-Peer (UK) 
2021 Live Art Fund, Jerwood (shortlisted), (UK) 
2023 Donna Lynas Residency, Wysing Arts Centre (Shortlisted), (UK) 
2020 - 2021 Artist Bursary Scheme, Arts Admin, London (UK)

© James Jordan Johnson 

ABOUT

Fray Tongue, 
19minutes 33seconds 

Filmed in the summer of 2025 in Donnington, Lincolnshire. Fray Tongue takes its name from the dual etymology of the word fray. Fray meaning a fabric worn at its edges but is also used to infer when a male deer rubs its antlers on a tree to mark its territory. The film brings together a confluence of cultural, political and familial understandings and experiences of what constitutes the rural experience. Displaying landscapes through a slow passage of time that subtly infers migrant agricultural labour, mono cropping, syncretic belief systems and understanding many rural landscapes as sites of demarcation.

Fish Bone in Thumb, Cabinet Closed, 2025
London Performance Studios, Spring Season
Salt Fish, Sewing Needle, White Thread, Water, Bowl, Flour, Rock, Spray Container, Ground Coffee and Blue Paper Bag

Fish Bone in Thumb, Cabinet Closed is a performance that calls upon and conjures imaginaries to conceive of ways for survival in an economy that treats everything as replaceable. From the incremental to the largesse, the piece uses physical expression or gesture as a way of attentive repair.

Gingy Fly, 2025
120mm

“He took a strong nail and a hammer with him and drove a nail into the tree up to the head with three strokes, dropped the hammer and walked away rapidly without looking back.” - Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston

Gingy fly (gin-gee fly), meaning fruit fly, worm or maggot in Jamaican etymology. Thinking through the material history and material function of afro-diasporic yards, the photographs comprise of various gestural approaches to tree stubs and barks as a form of sculpture and mark making. Recreating a structure found in my family yard growing up through found wood, twigs and vines or incorporating months long decayed banana skins are used as a means to create gingy fly offspring. 

Recenetly after spending my time feeling an onotological affinity toward trees, particulalry the space between the ground and the tree bark, i felt a desire in wanting to become them and feeling an emotional resemblance.  I wanted to think of how witnessing would feel like through the existence of a tree and its bark in particular. 

I am also interested in how trees have witnnessed how humans use them for spiritual purposes. What some kind of non-meaning, as in, ideas which derive of non empirical and systematic modes of making, constitute the agentive act of ritual. Trees offer such approaches of thinking for me. They have an extensive history of being utilised and imbued with purposes of human votives and with spiritual approaches to redeem ones life through a mediation between humans and God.

Libation, 2024 
Coconut, Rum, Loc, Bowl
Two channel vide filmed between Hanover, Jamaica and Norfolk, UK. 

Something is Trying to Disappear Me, 2024
Diaspora Now
Humber Street Gallery
Sugar, Water, Family Archives, Audio Recording, Calabash
Documentation by Abbie Jennings


Something is Trying to Disappear Me, 2023
Glasgowbuzzcut, Tramway
Soil, Vegetable Oil, Sand, Jug, Bowl, Decayed Plantain Skin on Paper  Ash, Dreid Plants and Wood
Documentation by Julia Bauer

As If Speech Were Forbidden On This Island
Margate Sea Front 
Sugar Cane, Rocks from Cow Bay (Jamaica), Decayed Coconut, Sea Water, Sand
Photography by Gabriel Silver Parker

A series of gestures I have been exploring for about a year and a half through the concept of a map, specifically in relation to the vicinity of the Caribbean & Jamaica as not just a fixed site of geography, but how desire and longing facilitates an invitation for the imagination and malleability. I am plotting Mandeville, Alligator Pond and Black River in Jamaica. Historically Black River was where the Zong ship (also called the ship of care) had departed from in Jamaica, which is the route in which JMW Turner (who developed an extensive visual language within Margate) had painted. I had spent two hours (in previous cases 3 and a half) trying to understand how cartography and psychogeography could be used to map the unmappable.

During The Hour of Darkness, 2022
Filmed on 16mm by Shamica Ruddock
Wooden Sticks, Black Soap, Cardboard Boxes, Rope, Grass, Salt, Jerrican, Water, Glass Bottle

During the Hour of Darkness is a site-specific performance by James Jordan Johnson, filmed by Shamica Ruddock, situated at the shores of Chalkwell, Southend on Sea. The work makes use of Chalkwell's momentary low tide as a liminal space which allows for distinct ways of seeing the land and water. The performance uses an idea of a continuous topographical departure and returns by using the feet and walking to unearth the amorphous properties of tar, which sits below the undercurrents of sand.