Julia Roche

OTOMYS, MELBOURNE

Held in Place
13 - 28 June 2024

Julia Roche and Juanita McLauchlan have slowly come to know each other’s artistic practices over the past 5-years while living and working on Wiradjuri Country in Wagga Wagga, NSW. In the last 12-months, they have each held major solo exhibitions at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, and through these projects have begun a deeper conversation about the work they make and their search for belonging on the land on which they live. Their practices are distinct in form and materiality, yet they share a grounding, an earthing, and a love for this place.

Julia Roche returned to her childhood home to live on the family farm Wooroola in 2018. Since returning she has developed a signature painting style that bears witness to the emotive and sublime qualities of the landscape. Working plein-air and on the ground, her canvases are exposed to the elements; the wash of the underpainting recording the wind, the mist, the insects, and the mood of the environment in which she works. Layering over this weathered composition, Julia’s mark-making brings to life the tree lines, dams, valleys and hills. Through this process, Julia has built a wealth of knowledge of her materials and how they interact with each other and nature. In these new works the process of painting at night, or on smaller works on paper, has created the conditions for Julia to work faster and with less consideration of a pictorial landscape. This experience has focussed her senses and her memories, resulting in immersive and gestural landscapes evocative of the cold of the night, an impending storm or a dream.

Juanita McLauchlan was born on her Grandmother’s Country, Gamilaraay Country, in Moree and has lived in many places across Australia before spending the last 20-years with her family in Wagga Wagga. Trained as a printmaker, Juanita has recently begun working with methods of contact-printing: using Indigenous plants sourced locally on Wiradjuri Country to eco-print on textiles. This method has allowed Juanita to work at a greater scale, printing directly onto recycled woollen blankets—a staple belonging of Aboriginal families since colonisation. The printed blankets are hand-stitched or cut into strips and made into necklaces adorned with possum-fur and bound with red thread symbolic of the family bloodline. There is a deep consideration in the choice of materials; Juanita draws on her Gamilaraay and European heritage, family stories, local histories and ways of making. Stories and memories are held in the material itself, and overlayed through printing and stitching, of the interconnectedness of Juanita’s family, with Country, across time.

The complex materiality of Julia and Juanita’s works locates them and holds them in place. Elements of the land on which they live are not just incorporated into the paint or dyes but often drive the composition or the form of the works themselves. Layered into these forms, marks are made, painted, printed, or stitched—telling stories, sharing histories, bearing witness. After 6-months of conversations between the artists, we can now see the works themselves held together in-conversation. Here, in the gallery space we can stand, encased in a woollen blanket, watching a storm roll in, as the trees shimmer in the rain. The stitching in this blanket tells that it has held many before us. We have the opportunity now to join this conversation, to be held in this place, and to consider how we hold the places that are dear to us.

Exhibition Essay, Hayley Megan French