JULIA GORMAN IN PUBLIC AND IN PRIVATE
As an artist Julia Gorman revels in shape and colour, form and movement. Her gaze is wide and eclectic and she finds sustenance and inspiration not only from the world around her but also the vast archive of artists, designers, craftspeople and makers whose work she regularly plunders on her source-finding expeditions to the library, internet and video store. Like a bowerbird foraging through a landscape of discarded and forgotten matter, Gorman has a skill for re-purposing motifs, styles and techniques from the past and marrying them with images from contemporary life.
Gorman has been exhibiting in Australia since the early 1990s, building up a body of work that includes site specific wall drawings, books, prints and sculptural installations, and developing a practice that is bold and irreverent. As a founding member of Melbourne’s artist run space Grey Area and the prolific and influential group Rubik (with James Lynch, Andrew McQualter and Ricky Swallow), she has maintained both an individual and collaborative practice. More recently, Gorman has begun to work outside the context of the gallery and move simultaneously into more public and more intimate spaces.
Recent projects which include back to back solo shows at Melbourne’s Uplands Gallery, a major public commission for Becton/Fender Katsalidis in St Kilda, a collaboration with Emily Floyd at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and a series of private commissions extend her investigation into the juxtaposition between provisional techniques and bold aesthetics and highlight the dynamic and responsive nature of her practice.
I met with Julia Gorman at her studio at the North Melbourne Meat Market, a sprawling complex of studios, galleries, offices and performance spaces, where she has been artist-in-residence, along with... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline