John Neylon is an Adelaide-based art writer and curator and formerly Head of Education, Art Gallery of South Australia. He is the author of numerous essays and several Wakefield Press books on South Australian artists, is a regular reviewer and columnist for the Adelaide Review and winner of the national 2014 Scarlett Award for writing on contemporary sculpture. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (ACIA).
Greg Johns' steel sculptures have a unique quality which reflects his uncompromising approach to making sculpture, from small to monumental scale, which is based firmly on his studio practice. His work has always communicated a love of forms, not only for their intrinsic aesthetic beauty but also their capacity to act as symbols for unifying systems which the artist believes connects all things.
For Johns the land defines Australian cultural identity. The rust-red profiles of his preferred medium, Corten steel, speak of the ranges, the deserts and the shores which visually define so much of Australia. These are combined in Johns' work with visual motifs which evoke the intense physicality of much of the continent; the heat-wave shimmer, dry rock escarpments and gibber plains, dry grass-lands sheared by winds and flame-licks running across a blackened tree limb.
Inspiration for Johns' land-based art has come principally from his acquisition, in the early 2000s, of a parcel of marginal land at Palmer, in rainshadow country in the hills east of Adelaide, South Australia. Here, in this stark but visually inspirational environment, Johns has sited sculptures which make statements about the true nature and necessity of European Australia's engagement with the land.