Bio:
A resident of Fairfax, California, Julia Lucey got her BFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. As an Artist-in-Residence at Kala Art Institute, Julia has focused on traditional etching techniques and aquatint to create images dealing with the evolving issues of wildlife, its dissolution, and the attempt by many to direct its path. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States.
Statement:
My work has always been inspired by my love of being outside in wild places. It is not just the calming escape it creates, but the curiosity and desire to know what inhabits each place. In my current work I have been creating individual etchings of the plants and animals that live near my home in Northern California. In some ways these etchings reference the natural history prints of artist/biologist cataloguers such as Audubon. Instead of editioning my etchings in a traditional way, I have instead been using the etchings as a base to build new landscapes. Where I have been closely paying attention to the shapes and locality of species in my etchings, I have become much looser in the way I collage and color them. I hand cut each plant out of the paper and then reassemble them on panel to create new worlds. In some of the worlds I reference narratives and folk tales I imagine could happen, but with local animals as the characters. In other collages, I set the animal gaze out toward the viewer in judgement. And in others, the pieces are simply about the magical feeling of being in a wild space.
Hear me talk about my work and process on the Cultivating Place podcast, recorded October, 2018
Aether Magazine - January 2019
