Fife Contemporary

Tzipporah Johnston introduces this exhibition in her own words.

“Much of my work sits inside contradictions. I wish I could say that it helps me to resolve them, but it doesn’t. What I can do is sit with them, look at them carefully, try to hold their weight for a while. 

The Museum of Monotropism – my ongoing, maybe even unending installation, from which the pieces here are drawn – came from that place. From the need to make something that could hold complicated feelings without necessarily forcing them to add up or provide a resolution.  

Monotropism, for those unfamiliar, is a theory about how autistic attention works. Our brains naturally want to focus intensely on one thing at a time. Shifting the spotlight of our attention from one thing to another can be slow, painful and exhausting. We function best when allowed to immerse within a single ‘attention tunnel’.  

This presents obvious challenges, but it’s also a profound source of joy – a way of being completely absorbed, completely alive to something. The Museum of Monotropism is made from that kind of attention: stitched objects, found objects, quiet acts of collecting, all following lines of focus that mean something to me and reflect the way my brain moves through the world. 

I sometimes describe the Museum as a ‘positive representation of autism,’ because that’s what people want to hear (and in fairness, compared to most cultural depictions of autism, it is positive). But I think it’s more accurate to call it nuanced. It’s a place where beauty and difficulty can exist at the same time.  

Pieces like Amulets Against Eye Contact and Venus Eye Traps are about the mixture of fascination and repulsion eye contact holds for me.  

Amulet for an Anthropocene Child reflects both my admiration for my friends’ hope, and my fear for the world their children will inherit.  

Even my cabinets of folk magic and natural history – the act of collecting and categorising – come out of the same feeling: a need to find small anchors in a world that feels overwhelming in its vastness and complexity.  

Collecting, stitching, assembling – they are ways I try to cope. Ways of laying things out so I can see them, dwell with them, and make connections, even when they don’t form a clean or complete narrative.   

Sometimes I look at the way other people seem to move through the world – how they can so easily simplify things, find a story that fits, let the rest fall away – and I wonder what that would be like. It certainly looks peaceful, but it’s not something I seem able to do. I can’t easily screen out the sensory overload, or set aside information that doesn’t fit neatly into societal narratives. I can’t quiet the contradictions just by choosing not to see them.  

The complexity of reality feels too much to hold all at once. 

So instead of trying to cover the whole of it, I shrink my focus. I carve out a small, manageable corner of the world – a little sanctuary where I can stay long enough to make sense of something. 

A postage stamp of a world, containing all the detail I can manage.”