My works are riffs and playful thinking responding to a complicated world, filled with confusion, conflict and often sadness.
Painting gives me a pause from the daily barrage of bad news. In using a multitude of colours and familiar geometric shapes in combination with meandering looping forms , I escape into a calm place and am absorbed in a simple uncomplicated practice of making , that provides moments to process deeper thoughts on the complexity of daily life. In this painting , I’m contemplating ideas of contentment, joy and happiness; overwhelming feelings that arise when I find myself back beside Lake Macquarie, listening to birdsong and gazing out from my parents back windows to to treetops.
Although not referencing the tangible physical world , my work , inquisitively, reflects on how humans feel and how colours, shapes, patterns and forms can be uplifting, ruminative and harmonious.
Julia Flanagan works across painting, sculpture, textiles and drawing. Born in Lake Macquarie, Julia moved to Sydney to study Painting and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2004 and her Painting Honours in 2005. In 2024, Julia collaborated with media artist Miguel Felipe Valenzuela on a large scale interactive 360 degree video installation titled Endless Sunbeams in Another Time at MAP MIMA on Awabakal country for Museum of Art and Culture , MAC Yapang.
Julia was commission to make a series of large scale sculptures for exhibition in the gardens of The Hazelhurst Gallery in Gymea, NSW, titled Many Things to Many in 2022. In 2020 she collaborated with Iconic fashion label GORMAN on an extensive collection of clothing adorned with her artwork. She has exhibited extensively in galleries in Sydney, Wollongong, Melbourne and Newcastle, and has works in local and international private and institutional collections. She has been a finalist in many art prizes including Muswellbrook, Waverley , Gosford and in 2019 won the sculpture prize for the Georges River Art Prize.