“My name is Sherry Johnstone, a proud First Nations designer and artist from Warrnambool, Victoria, Australia, living and working on Gunditjmara Country. I’m in my early fifties, and my creative journey has unfolded naturally through my painting, and now onto knitwear”. This is how the creative person with a complex training path presents herself. “Between the ages of 16 -20 I completed a Signwriting Apprenticeship knowing that I wanted to do something around painting and creating when I finished school and although Signwriting was creative, it was creating to a brief for shopfronts and advertising signs etc. mainly hand painting lettering, so it taught me to be very neat and precise, but it wasn’t storytelling like I do now. I worked in various roles throughout our First Nations community for 30 years, then in 2014 onwards, I started to teach myself to paint. This time with stories coming from my own spiritual and cultural experiences, thoughts, and beliefs. I found that over time I would intuitively paint, using traditional symbolism in various ways to represent a First Nations perspective but in a contemporary way, often surprising myself with the amount of meaning and story that my works held. Overtime I realised that this is a natural gift and that people are very interested in the story and often feel moved by the message it carries”.
