The tragedy that changed everything for artist Julia Gutman

This interview with artist Julia Gutman was published in November 2020, as the artist was preparing for an exhibition at Artspace in Woolloomooloo in Sydney.

Twelve months ago Julia Gutman was living in New York making sculptures from found textiles and objects, having completed studies at Rhode Island School of Design in 2018.

“I was thinking about the sculptures in terms of their politics, and what [their materials] represented on a global level,” she says, “Like who made them, where were they produced, what that says about gender, what that says about class.”

Then a close friend with whom Gutman shared her studio died in a cycling accident. “It was … one of those crazy life moments where everything shifts. I ended up moving back home [to Australia] and … re-centering the way I was thinking about life. Relationships are everything and people are everything.”

Julia Gutman with the work she has entered into this year's fellowship.Credit: Renee Nowytarger

This change extended to Gutman’s art practice. “I had all this material that I had collected in the studio to represent one thing, and all of a sudden it just felt related to our friendship, and to her. It shifted the way I started thinking about materials.”

The Sydney-based artist began asking friends for used clothes, which she has used in the embroidered textile work No one Told Me the Shadows Could Be so Bright, Gutman’s contribution to the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship exhibition, currently showing at Woolloomooloo's Artspace Visual Arts Centre.

While Gutman found herself creating imagery of friends using their clothes, “rather than being a depiction of those relationships specifically it’s more about … those pieces of ourselves that we leave behind in each other, and how we’re made of everyone that we meet.”

During lockdown Gutman lost access to her Waverley Council studio space for six months, so each detailed portrait was made at the sewing machine in her bedroom, and later incorporated into the larger pieces on show. “I like to LOL: I like ‘lots of labour’,” she says, explaining that the figures in the works are meticulously built up over time, in contrast to the bolder collaged elements that can come together in an evening’s work.

Now Gutman is one of eight finalists in the running for fellowship. With more than 100 years of history, the fellowship is one of the nation's longest standing travelling art scholarships. Each year, a judging panel convened by Create NSW selects finalists from a competitive round of proposals. The $30,000 prize allows an emerging artist to undertake a self-directed program of professional development.

Since 1997 the exhibition has been presented at Artspace and for the past five years shortlisted artists have worked with Artspace curators while developing work for the show. This year has offered particular challenges for the curators, Artspace Executive director Alexie Glass-Kantor and Elyse Goldfinch, but Goldfinch notes that the artists “responded to the idea that we could do things differently, and that they could also feel supported to expand their practices and to take risks".

“What does it mean to be a curator with the etymology of the word curator as carer?” says Glass-Kantor. “To think about care for artists, care for audiences, care for the process? How do you support risk-taking … at a time when contact can present unprecedented risk?”

Interior gallery walls have been removed to allow maximum numbers in the space and make it easier for visitors to maintain physical distancing. Connections can be found between the finalists’ works, and the openness of the gallery encourages these discoveries. The human voice is heard in the works of Akil Ahamat and Kate Brown, for example, while Nadia Hernandez and Kirtika Kain both incorporate text into their works. Tiyan Baker, Dennis Golding and Tarik Ahlip harness elements of the natural and built environment.

Unlike past years, artists’ works are interwoven rather than segregated, and artworks are propped, scattered, tethered and suspended around the gallery.

Gutman’s works are also suspended in the space, using industrial chains that represent communities and ways of connecting. Gutman describes herself as a sentimental person, and even fabric in her work that isn’t from friends’ clothes has acquired meaning: green tablecloths from the op shop were used as picnic blankets before finding their way into the work. “In this climate and this time it felt really poignant for me to just focus on moments of joy, [to] take that seriously, give it weight and not dismiss it, and think about the complexity and power of those kinds of relationships.”