JULIE ANDREWS - Following the Half-Light
Julie Andrews
Daydreaming, 2025
Oil on Canvas
93 x 63 cm
Julie Andrews
Following the Half-Light
30 January - 2 March 2025
Opening Event: 2pm Saturday 1 February 2025
Artist Floor Talk: 2pm Sunday 16 February 2025
This is the second exhibition of Julie Andrews to be shown at Cascade Art Gallery in Maldon central Victoria. In this body of work Julie Andrews explores mornings and evenings in her central Victorian environs with an eye for the transient effects of light on the landscape. The art works venture into the twilight, blurring the line between the recognisable and the imagined, an amalgam of reconstructed fictions, dreams, memories, feelings and experiences.
The locations explored are situated somewhere between the poetic and nostalgic, folded gently together to allow a glimpse of the awesome and sublime in our everyday landscape.
Quotes from opening speaker Kate Gamble, Academic and Art Collector. Kate opened Julie’s previous exhibition “Alchemy, Meditations and Mysteries” at Cascade Art Gallery in 2023.
Permission has been given to use these words I have abstracted from speech notes. I think they aptly describe Julie Andrews artwork.
“Conventionally, landscapes evoke or represent places. Even when they are an edited version of that place or painted from memory or imagination, they spatially hold and represent moments for us”.
“Julie’s works aren’t aren’t precisely located, rather they are a kind of any place, one that’s only partially apprehended, as if we’re moving through, on our way somewhere else”.
“Often these are recognisable, but don’t so much evoke a place as a sensation. We might not be able to say where it was, but we remember that drowsy moment of childhood, of late-night driving and lights through rain and sleep. That moment in between – still conscious but almost somewhere else. That was my first moment of recall when looking at Julie’s work”.
“That’s what is so delicious about her work – that it draws us into a reverie that we’re not even aware of entering”.
“She’s not seeking to represent place at all – to me, instead, these are spaces. Rather than being full of layered meaning, here Julie seeks to use an equally dense and rich backdrop of theory often psychological, along with her particular manipulation of materials, to evoke a state of being. She speaks of liminal spaces (and much of her earlier work in public art works with liminal spaces)”.
“Julie’s use of recognisable images like trees and landforms, elements of the natural world, the disappearing horizon, along with all these circles both clearly formed and roughly spattered, and all rendered in her particular colour palette, these all take us to someplace else. They hold us in a moment of meditative calmness that belies imagery that in another context could even be read as foreboding. The layering of paint and glazing creates a depth and luminosity, yet where this layering could make for smoothness, here the marks and small craters aren’t smoothed, but are maintained as integral”.
“They evoke or even create a state of being, one that is somehow in-between. The same sort of in-between as meditation. The same sort of in-between as ritual and devotion. The sort of space that enables reflection, perhaps questioning, and often understanding. While she doesn’t pose the questions here, she affords space for us to enter, and just perhaps to form the questions we most need to ask ourselves”.
Kate Gamble
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In Julie Andrew’s moody paintings you are invited to explore the theme of unknowing and the notion of uncertainty – a reflection on what was and what might be. We are presented with potentially rich, open-ended opportunities that resonate with our own mortality and sense of self. Her paintings are an open door to a myriad of possibilities, be they psychological, emotional or spiritual readings.
Julie’s paintings are highly layered with abstract meaning and metaphor and this is echoed in a material sense. Her paintings are visceral, tactile and delightfully sumptuous.
Julie is a very physical artist and moves paint around with gusto. It is at times literally thrown over the canvas leaving explosive divets, splashes and energetic marks and paint craters that ‘form a skin’, sometimes highly glossy smooth, other times not so. Mediums and glazes have been worked and reworked in a manipulative manner, more akin to a sculptor modelling a three-dimensional form, often achieving unique and sublime results – paintings that aim to transcend the physicality of time and place.
Julie has evocative titles and the words give us a clue. Not clarity or answers to ‘frequently asked questions,’ but moreso, signposts to contemplate and consider the space in between – the liminal.
Liminal spaces are places we go to when we travel. We glimpse the liminal, that in-between state. Like sleeping and waking. Like unconscious and conscious. A potentially rich place where magic and mystery can sit quite comfortably without judgement.
Kareen Anchen – Gallery Director