I am a story-teller interested in what happens in a society that separates the brain from the body, and that sees itself as divorced from the rest of the natural world. My recent work casts Mother Nature as mischievous, hungry, and not entirely benevolent monster-deities just below the surface—lying in wait to devour, digest, decompose, and regenerate. Historically rooted in Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre woodcuts and in memento mori paintings, these works remind us that one day, even those of us most inclined toward greed and cataclysm will die—the earth will eat them and new life will spring forth. If soil is a metaphor of transformation, what of ourselves can be reborn if we allow our most destructive parts to break down into fertile mulch? These works call for time to digest

My background is in the socio-politically conscious tradition of printmaking, and I combine printmaking techniques with painting and collage to make vibrant, multi-layered mixed media compositions. Stylistically, I embrace Hieronymus Bosch’s elaborate mastery of the grotesque, and Frida Kahlo’s powerful and vulnerable self-portraits. Conceptually, I embrace Betye Saar’s commonly employed phrase  “Extreme times call for extreme heroines,”and poet Alok Menon’s call for us to“find beauty in the parts of ourselves that we’ve marked for dead.”  My work invites us to reconnect with the substance of ourselves, our environment, and each other.

Julia Curran received her MFA in printmaking from Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi in 2015 and was a Fulbright scholar in Paris in 2011–12. She has exhibited her work widely including at Print Center New York; SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, Los Angeles; the Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Rochester Contemporary Art Center; the El Paso Museum of Art; Musée Roger Quillot, Clermont-Ferrand, France; Duane Reed Gallery, St. Louis; and Field Projects, New York, NY. Her work has been published in Hey! Magazine, Studio Visit, and Friend of the Artist. Recently, she was awarded residencies at Tongue River Artist Residency in Dayton, WY; the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY; and the Jentel Foundation in Banner, WY. Curran currently lives and works in Los Angeles.