Julia Townsend
Julia Townsend (b.1965 Sewickley, PA, USA) Lives and works in Edenton, North Carolina. Townsend grew up mostly in Noank, Connecticut and later majored in art history as a way to stay in art, while studying liberal arts. A few years after college she realized making art was really what she wanted, so she figured out how to live in other countries by teaching ESL (or art), and then pursued her studio work while learning foreign languages. Her first solo exhibition was at the Harlem Jazz Club in the Barrio Gotico of Barcelona in 1991. The country she lived in the longest was the UAE where she participated in several SIKKA exhibitions, among other shows, and taught at the American University in Dubai. She now lives in a refurbished peanut mill and co-manages a small nonprofit artist residency/community arts program, that includes the Spruill Conservation Farm on the Albemarle Sound as of December, 2023.
On drawing, Townsend believes it’s immediate: no mixing, no clean up. She can respond intuitively to the world’s injustices, working into and between the borders to find impractical complexities. Townsend enjoys sorting, or blurring, the figures from the grounds. She is drawn to the machine imagery of Futurism and the contradictions of Cubist space, particularly Juan Gris. The digital age feels like a concealed Rube Goldberg-ian construction: a virtual labyrinth of click baits and passwords.
Art (for Townsend) is at its best when it can make her rethink something she thought she was already familiar with.
www.juliatownsendartist.blogspot.com
