Julia Bland makes artworks that exist somewhere in the space between painting, sculpture, and tapestry. Her experimental process incorporates stitching, weaving, knotting, dying, and even burning her materials, creating sublime abstractions of geometric compositions. Bland also creates oil and canvas collages in the same vein, as well as drawings that help her think through her ideas, functioning as a kind of map with different marks indicating the process or material she intends to engage.
Early in Bland’s career, after training as a painter at Rhode Island School of Design and before learning to weave, she spent time in Morocco, where she studied Islamic art and Sufism. Immersing herself in the intricate patterns found in Moroccan homes, Bland apprenticed herself to a woodworker specializing in elaborately carved doors. This deep dive into craft built upon her earlier encounters in Palo Alto, California, where she first experienced art through family friends, many of whom prescribed to the hippie counterculture movement. One friend gifted Bland a loom that remains an integral part of her practice today. She incorporates this loom as one of many tools—alongside her trusty scissors, and, of course, her hands— to transform fabric into a dynamic tableau. Bland’s experience in Morocco has embedded itself in her work, which often contains intricate geometric patterns that recall ornate Islamic architecture and images of snakes, a sign of death and rebirth in Sufism. Other forms in her paint-tapestry hybrids resemble the suspension bridges of New York. Bland’s work is that of balance, referencing and finding beauty in the spiritual world, the natural world, and the urban world all the same.
Bland’s large-scale wall hangings engulf viewers in their charged surfaces, created with a truss of tactile splendor of hand woven and dyed wool, cotton and linen, as well as other materials like canvas, wax, oil paint and even found denim, blankets, or bed sheets. Saturated and textural, Bland’s creations kaleidoscopically unfold, essentially symmetrical but laced with tactical asymmetries in composition, color, and material. Hints of familiar objects and materials emerge through the layers of fabric and thread, while Bland’s use of tie-dye techniques harken back to the 1960s stain painting of Abstract Expressionism and the era’s hippie counterculture, a movement which she unapologetically invokes in her work. This bricolage of references and technique lends to a complex tapestry of layers, where no one layer or material holds priority over another.
Allusions to her process and remnants of her materials are ever-present in Bland’s work. She observes that these vestiges “give you information about how the work came together. There are the technical and formal aspects of the technique, and then there is the social naming of it.” As critic and art historian Glenn Adamson observes, “Craft is typically encountered either as culturally-encoded, perhaps folkish, perhaps kitschy; conversely, it may be seen as a culturally-neutral modus operandi, simply a way of arriving at form. Bland refuses this false opposition. When she uses a technique, she takes on its full range of association and potential, absorbing it whole. This is the impulse that drives her practice forward.”
Julia Bland was born in Palo Alto, CA in 1986. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and received her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2012. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lighthouse Works, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, and The Shandaken Project: Storm King. She has received awards including The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship from Yaddo, The Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize, NYFA/NYSCA fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, The Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting, and the Natasha And Jacques Gelman Travel Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY; Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Guesthouse Projects, Jackson, WY; The Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and On Stellar Rays; New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, China; and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY. She has been reviewed or featured in many publications, including The New York Times, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Bland lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.