Julia Roche

Living and working in regional Australia is a joy for many artists, who find themselves without distractions, and surrounded by their subject matter, boundless space and skies. Missing however from the life of the regional artist is the happenstance of proximity: to galleries and museums, the opportunity to engage with peers, to seek and receive critical attention, and to make good on opportunities as they present themselves.

The answer for some is a constant back and forth, travelling between city lights and the bush. For others, the answer is to leave forever, or to seek and find sustenance in place.

In recent years Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in the Eastern Riverina has sought to support artists in place through its Regional Artist Development (RAD) program, involving exhibition opportunities, mentored residencies, master workshops, and talks program. Each year the Gallery also offers the opportunity for one exceptional regional artist to work with a metropolitan based curator over a six-month period. The artist receives structured critical attention as they work to achieve a new body of work to be exhibited in our Margaret Carnegie Gallery. In 2023 this opportunity was offered to painter Julia Roche.

Well known to the Gallery as an active member of the Riverina’s creative community, Julia Roche has been practicing as a professional artist for 15 years. Eager to grow in her practice, the Gallery arranged in 2023 for her to participate in peer-to-peer mentoring with West Australian artist Anna Louise Richardson. The mutual benefits of this engagement led to Julia accepting our further invitation to work with Sydney based painter and curator Dr Hayley Megan French. In doing so, Julia also accepted the inherent risk of opening herself and practice to the close attention of another’s eye. And so, over the many months, never veering from her subject matter and vocation – to paint the night sky and the land she loves and knows so well, Julia’s work has leapt forward; to be now as a poet might write, gestural and loose – it is all place and feeling, warm earth, clouds and swirling galaxies above.

We applaud the risk, we applaud the result.

Dr Lee-Anne Hall, Director, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
March 2024