IMPERCEPTIBLE Julia
Boros
From imperceptible to perceptible
A glass-head pin in her hand, the artist steps with bare feet towards an enormous, perfectly round balloon. She pierces the sharp metal through the balloon’s surface, thick with layers of white cotton thread and moulding paste. The rending of the membrane is not a remarkable event; there is a puff but no sharp sound or explosion.
The process of slow deflation starts.
Julia Boros’s exhibition and video, both titled Imperceptible, document the deflation process: air leaving the body of a balloon. While quiet and calm in its sparse black and white aesthetics, Imperceptible appears as a surprisingly noisy work. The balloon crackles, sizzles, frizzles, and rattles as it flattens.
During the past decade, Julia Boros has worked extensively with textile-related media, often creating large-scale, spatially bold and haptically attractive works to be encountered in the exhibition space. This time it is a video-only exhibition.
Because the process is the work, says Boros.
Connected to a life event – the recent death of Boros’s sister – the video bears witness to air leaving the balloon. What is left behind is an empty white shell of thread and moulding paste. Sitting by her sister’s bed, watching the energy and life leave her body, Boros observed how less air was inhaled and exhaled day by day. This process itself was rather ruthlessly imperceptible. It was happening right there but hard to grasp.
In the video, what is imperceptible is made perceptible, and this has necessitated a lengthy process of sustained work and care. First, Boros had to learn how to blow up sizable balloons without completely exhausting herself, while also avoiding excessive pressure and stress on the biodegradable latex. Boros then encircled the balloon with metres of thread, providing a sort of second skin or scaffolding. It took multiple trials, months of work, to find the balance needed to match material and balloon – to fill a balloon with human-blown air to the size her trials determined.
There was moulding paste involved in the process too. This, Boros applied attentively, caressing the balloon’s gummy surface as if it was human facial skin.
The video Imperceptible is raw in that it is not edited; it is true to the deflation process – until the last breath, so to speak. There are sounds of air leaving the balloon, but the air conditioner’s humming is present, too, attesting to the ever-present social-material framings of life.
In this way, Boros avoids over-aesthetising the event of energy leaving the body. Instead, the video materialises the often imperceptible process of the dying breath by making it sensuously perceptible –expressing the event through the cracking sounds of the scaffold breaking as the balloon deflates.
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi Contemporary art scholar and art historian based in Finland.
Textiles' ability to communicate human physicality is a guiding light in my practice. In this body of work, cotton thread features heavily as a conduit to capture and restrict a body of air.
My air
My air within a latex balloon
My air escapes Inflation
The works are reflections in action. I reflect on life's cyclical nature in Spooling - Way of the Thread. In Imperceptible, when piercing the membrane, I simultaneously reflect on the moment life begins and the moment of letting go, a witness to the journey from this world to the next.
Diverting from regular practice, Imperceptible combines broader material investigations with video footage. In a moving image, the atmosphere is contained and the container. "I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible" [1].
For me, video provides that bridge.
Julia Boros April 20231. Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side – A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, 2023, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, page 247. Quotation attributed to an excerpt from Max Beckmann’s On My Painting (1938).
"Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the whole world."
- Anaximenes
Julia Boros is a South Australian based visual artist whose practice incorporates the creation of site responsive installation and soft sculpture. Implementing her experience of traditional and experimental printing and production methods Julia explores textile manipulation. A background in theatre and film influences the performative aspects of her process and outcomes.
Julia was the 2022 SALA Artist in residence with Arts in Health at Flinders Medical Centre and the exhibition Capacity was a SALA awards finalist. She was a finalist in the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award for the work Holding Space (2021) and ReRegister culminated as the Inaugural Women’s Art Register Artist-In-Residence exhibition (2019). In 2018 Julia attended Textílsetur Íslands (Icelandic Textile Centre residency) in Blönduós. Julia has a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2016) and was awarded a National Gallery of Australia Women’s Association Award in the same year.
Thanks
Jaynie Langford
Maureen Neville
Sauerbier House staff and volunteers
City Of Onkaparinga
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Victoria Reeves
Kerri McConchie
Pete Hall
Chris Gee
All images courtesy of the artist. Materials: biodegradable latex balloons, moulding paste, thin medium, textile stiffening medium, cotton yarn, air. Copyright 2023.
Imperceptible
6 May – 17 June
List of Works
Imperceptible, 2023
single channel video
duration 7:51
limited edition of 3, $1000
Spooling – Way of the Thread, 2023
single channel video
duration 3:33
limited edition of 3, $800
