A lot of Julia’s work focuses on making Connexions between identity, sense of self and places and location. Being both half British half Greek Cypriot and Julia spent a lot of her life travelling and residing between both England and Cyprus which has allowed her to draw a lot of significance to her photographic practice this idea of constant shifting from one place to another, particularly where this sense of self and identity is concerned.
‘Chasing dreams’ is the project where Julia started to explore the more fragmented state of dreams, looking into how our own identity is within dreams and how this can be slightly obscured. Julia introduced glitch art techniques starting with some long exposure portraits
Julia used long exposures to reflect this idea of our identity being quite obscure in dreams and then started to introduce those glitch editing techniques on top of it so it’s merging photography with glitch art.
non-compos mentis
‘Non-compos mentis’ project focused more on the conscious mind unlike ‘Chasing Dreams’ focusing on the unconscious mind. Taking the plunge with self-portraiture concept inspired by Cindy Sherman and her concept of playing these various personas and characters in her disguised self-portraits. Cindy looked at identity and social role-playing. Julia also came across Francesca Woodman delving into this concept of human fragility and she created really beautiful and yet haunting self-portraits. In Julia’s project Absence and presences she talks about how a place and a location can stir memories and emotions in us. Relating this to what is called the Proust effect which is the phenomenon of reliving events and memories through sensory stimuli.
The Furlough diaries
The lockdown began and it opened a huge window of time to create artwork again for Julia. This allowed her to research other artists that were responding to the pandemic creatively and helped her create a body of work that she felt others could also relate to during this time of uncertainty. Creating The Furlough Diaries, started forcing on mundane things which had an interesting quality. This led Julia to explore her mental state and identity within this body of work as well as documenting days at home but with a focus on exploring the importance of place in relation to identity at this time. Which shows how Julia develops her photographic projects over time, through the actual making of the work.
I really enjoy the way Julia’s photographic process develops overtime as she shoots a project I think this helps to show a clear creative narrative through the body of work something that I take away from Julia’s work is how her photographic work is so strong in concept which really is the underpinning of her bodies of work which is something that I’d look to develop within my own photographic practice.