Deep Secrets

I did this show at Uplands in 2003. This is the only photo I have, I think Jarrod took it. 

These drawings are vinyl on water colour paper. There were four of them in the show. They were really hard to do, because I had this big roll of heavy paper, which I cut into  large sheets, but the paper desperately wanted  to stay rolled. I had to put all my books and boxes and hammers and any heavy things I had to hand on the ends to keep them flat enough so I could apply the vinyl. Also, if I made a mistake with the placement and had to pull the vinyl up it tore the surface of the paper, so it was stressful to do. I was pregnant with Charlie at the time, and the huge stomach contributed a lot to the difficulty.

One of these got sold, but because the paper never really flattened out, the vinyl ended up pressing against the perspex of the frame, leading to a bad plastic + plastic encounter. I had to make another one for the collector, which I dreaded, but by that stage I wasn't pregnant any more so it was quite easy. All the other ones got wrecked in the frames too, but I didn't bother remaking them.

The moral of this story is...? I don't know.

Julia

This was a show above the Carlton Hotel, in Bourke St. Mark Feary was the curator. There was me, Damiano Bertoli, Rob McHaffie, Matt Griffin, James Lynch, Tony Garifilakis, Sue Dodd, Pat Foster and Jen Berean. It was February, 2007.

Each artist got a room in what had recently been a  boarding house. The spaces were really dirty. I had planned to clean mine up, do a floor/wall drawing and hang a cardboard sculpture from the ceiling, basically, my usual work, but after a few hours in there, I felt silly about it. It  felt like the art was sitting very precariously on top of the unhappiness of the space.  The idea of writing my name on the door in children's painted wooden letters just came to me as a way to represent the absurdity and bravery of trying to  name a space your own  in that situation.

I put the bits of cardboard and the rolls of vinyl in the cupboard.
Some people told me they'd looked for my work but it had been stolen. Not sure if they were joking or not. Other people thought I had battered the walls and smashed up sink myself as part of the work.

James Lynch's work "Chinese Laundry' was a particular highlight for me. So was Rob McHaffie's "Machine not working" which now hangs above my computer. 

I'm not sure who took the photos - let me know if you do!

Paintings 1997

I've always wanted to be a painter, like a real painter that goes to the studio and paints, and has all these different paintings on the go, and you stare at one for ages, then you catch another one out of the corner of your eye and you realise what you need to do, and you jump up and finish that one. I like the idea of having everything contained within that space of the canvas. Ideally I'd be like Brice Marden, with a Summer studio in the Greek Islands. He paints in the morning, then  has lunch, he rides his horses, and/or goes for a swim. His paintings dry quickly in the heat, so he comes back and does a bit more on them in the late afternoon.

Here are some paintings I did in 1997. The first lot are from a show I did at Grey Area in April that year. (The ends of the long paintings got cut off in the slide scanner.)

These ones below are from a show Andrea Blundell and I did at Linden later that year, called 'Dialogue'. I don't have any photos of Andy's work - being a rampant egomaniac I didn't think to take any at the time. I asked Andy recently if she had any and she said they were at the bottom of a pile of boxes. We had that double room on the left as you go in. I was at the front and she was at the back. You can see her work a bit in the fourth photo down. 

My concept was to have an MDF box  sitting  on top of the mantlepiece, with the depth matching the depth of the marble, with the front painted in basic, screen-inspired shapes using a nice can of blue enamel paint I had found in the mis-tints pile. The side closer to the window was lighter green, because that side was closer to the window, so it was lighter - get it?  Once the box was made I realised how heavy it was. Not only how was I going to move it, but also that it would probably break the mantlepiece, which would be embarrassing, and expensive to replace. So I painted the four side parts following the theme of lighter  towards the window. Two were open shapes, giving the feeling of extending off the support,  and two were enclosing space within the painting.