VISUAL ARTIST SHOWCASE JULIE COCKBURN

Visual artist and creator

Julie Cockburn’s incredibly evocative collages are painstakingly created in her rural Suffolk studio and travel to new homes all over the world. Her creativity, innovation and elevation of found objects into high art is so important in a world weighed down by waste.

I met her by coincidence at the local pottery studio where she creates her ceramics. Once introduced to her work, I jumped at the chance to ask her if she’d like to be included in the magazine. Thankfully she agreed. She told us a little about her craft and shared some of her current favourite pieces.

Tell us about you.

I am a visual artist living in Suffolk, working with a wide range of materials to create hybrid, highly crafted collages. My practice is difficult to define, though in the past I have been described as a book artist, a sculptor and a photographer. I use all these monikers to explore the way we look at and interpret the plethora of images that surround us. I am represented by galleries in London, Brussels and Amsterdam.

What do you do and why?

I trained as a sculptor at Central Saint Martins art college in the 1990s and we were taught to use anything and everything as our materials – lack of funds meant that I spent a lot of time in charity shops and skip diving and it’s that way of working that continues in my practice today I source old photographs, postcards and second-hand books from the internet or car boot fairs – found images that I alter using traditional techniques such as hand embroidery, painting, inlay and screen printing

Each image has its own specific composition and colour that I respond to Because I work on a found image (the antidote to starting with the proverbial ‘blank canvas’) I enter into a form of dialogue with it, responding to what I see in the original Composition is key I work in a painterly way, I think, using shape, texture and colour to try to keep balance in the piece whilst at the same time engaging the viewer with humour or unease

What inspires you?

The found images themselves always conjure up some emotion or feeling, but I also find inspiration in everyday things My garden always amazes me, the transition of the seasons, light and colour

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The old Spanish tourist postcards of stitched flamenco dancers are a long-time obsession, together with Japanese craftsmanship, mid-century furniture, Soviet era posters, Robert Rauschenberg, ikebana and cake decorating videos on Instagram

What do you wear to work in?

I work from home in a small studio overlooking my garden My practice isn’t generally a messy one – I tend to spend hours stitching an embroidered piece or cutting out and reassembling small fragments of photographs – so I don’t wear protective clothing. I pretty much always wear jeans and a warm, comfortable sweatshirt or jumper I pad around the house in my black Birkenstock Arizona’s Nothing glamorous

What’s next?

It’s a busy time for me I’m currently working towards a solo exhibition at Hopstreet Gallery in Brussels in November 2023, together with some other group shows and art fairs in Suffolk, Amsterdam and Paris. I have recently started to work at a ceramic studio and I’m experimenting with integrating pottery into my photographic and collage works: It’s important to keep moving one’s practice forwards

Image credits: Julie Cockburn

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