Julia Pomeroy, London (b.1998) has just graduated from the MA Fine Art Course at City and Guilds London School of Art and she has been awarded the Leverhulme Scholarship for this. Julia is moving into Cell Studios, Dalston, this autumn.

 

Julia has exhibited with a range of galleries across the UK including Assembly House and East Street Arts in Leeds, Eve Liebe Gallery in London and online exhibitions such as with London based Auction Collective and NewBloodArt and American based galleries ArtInSquare and Dodomu Gallery. Julia has been featured in several arts magazines from SuboArt in 2024, Artit and Contemporary Art Collectors in 2023. Julia was longlisted for the Women in Art prize this year.

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In my painting practice, I explore figuration and narratives reflecting contemporary life and analyse them by playing with vibrant colour, contrast and gestural mark-making. I use simplifying and abstracting painting processes to depict underlying psychologies and energies within my scenes. Together this often creates a feeling of hyper-existence or artificiality I then juxtaposed over contemplative figures caught in everyday life, challenging a sense of place and stability. I’ve recently been focusing on humans’ relationship with nature today. Manipulating paint to anaylse experiences in mystical feeling landscapes, sometimes contrasted with man-made objects to reflect the modern world.

 

Locations of nature I investigate, celebrate and reflect through in my paintings creates a space to remember and personalise our internal relationships with the land. Calling to our ancestry and place on the earth while bringing a feeling of bright colour and artificiality that builds up society today. I work with lucid, acidic, bright and sickly waves of colour, in relation to the lights and darks creating different forms and subjects. This functions to challenge the realities I see from my research, expose an emotional concern or joy within the experience, and contradict my seemingly natural scenes with unnatural hues. 

 

My paintings investigate the versatility of painting through merging techniques and styles. I begin working with blurring, painterly grounds then gradually layering expressive marks and building suggestions of recognisable forms. In some works, I slow my paintings down by depicting elements of direct realism, often in the forms of symbolic objects, from plants to digital technology, acting as clues for my narratives while immersed in otherworldly colours and textures. 

 

Inspired by personal experiences, found online imagery, pop culture and art history, my work aims to analyse what the contemporary sublime is and find a place that can exist between the real and imaginary.