London-based artist Cat Johnston creates expressive puppets and sculptures that blend folklore, nature, and childhood memories into eccentric characters like a fashionable bat, a melancholy sun, and gods representing sunburn, hay fever, and insomnia. Her work, which draws on historical costumes and emotive, cartoonish faces, inhabits dreamlike realms where the familiar meets the strange.
Johnston is expanding her practice into film and animation, having recently completed a short film, "The Wickywock and the Jubjub Berry," with animator Joseph Wallace. She has a solo exhibition coinciding with a local pagan festival and has signed with Passion Pictures as a director, while developing ideas for animated series and a new mixed-media short film. Her work represents a contemporary, tactile engagement with folk art and storytelling, pushing puppetry into new narrative and cinematic formats.