Julie Reid 'Beyond the Surface'

Julie's Exhibition will run between 13th September - 9th October
With a private viewing being held on 18th September, 5-7pm

Beyond the Surface

This new body of work adds to my continual process of discovery of ‘Self’, human relationships with nature, the decisions we make and the perceptions we carry. I intend to create a dialogue between the mark making, surface, interwoven collage materials and paint in a journey to search the very essence of human interaction with the environment and nature. As humans we are nature and in turn part of the story and dialogue within each piece.

Trees appear a lot within my work referencing the resilience of nature to human interference with it. Silver birch are my go to tree. I n their creamy grey white bark I see hidden landscapes and marks akin to words; and music; a kind of asemic language given to us by nature that we still need to interpret.

The placement of the collage papers is a continuation of the mark making . I cannot describe the pleasure it gives when a torn edge echoes a drawn line. Equally the search for the words within many of the pieces has become an important part of the process in producing the imagery. I hunt through endless small pieces of text that I then intertwine to join the conversation between the collage papers , the asemic text and colours in the marks of paint, ink or pencil.

Whilst I ‘write’ the asemic text ( ‘a wordless open form of semantic language’) I am constantly thinking of ideas, thoughts and feelings I want to express so it feels very much like writing. After all handwriting is a form of mark making and communication. I add real words but in a very abstract way , disguised in the flow and often the marks I make accidentally resemble words. This also leads o the inclusion of tiny books within some of the pieces. This concept began with thinking of the infinite number of unread words sitting on bookshelves across the planet; poetry never read, advice never taken.: what would nature write in her book of advice on how to protect her?

I invite you, the viewer, to look deeper into the work, journey through the landscape or woodland, find the hidden words and connections that lie Beyond the Surface.

William Blake said ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eye of others only a green thing that stands in the way.
Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ….and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the (wo)man of imagination, nature is imagination itself’