Julia Curtin

b. 1974, London

2012-2014 MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art, London
2006-2009 BA Photography, London College of Communication, London

Recent exhibitions

Group shows:
2012 ‘Photoville’, Pier 3, Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York
2011 ‘International Discoveries III’, FotoFest Gallery, Houston
2011 ‘Bauhaus Now: Contemporary Applications’, UIMA, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago
2010 ‘Paper, Rock Scissors: The Contructed Image in New British Photography’, Flash Forward Festival, Toronto
2010 ‘Fresh Faced & Wild Eyed 2010’, The Photographers Gallery, London
2010 ‘Collision: Where Image Worlds Meet’, Flowers East Gallery, London

Awards and Residencies:
2010 Rhubarb Bursary Award, Arts Council and Rhubarb, Birmingham
2010 Academy Meets Photokina Award, Photokina, Cologne
2009 Photoworks Graduate Award, Photoworks, London

Artist’s Statement

Julia Curtin’s work often takes the form of photographs, collage and sculpture, and deals with memory and history through the translation of notions of the document.

In her recent work, Reparation, she depicts a series of dresses reconfigured from Walker Evans’ images in the seminal work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Published in 1941, the book, written by James Agee and photographed by Evans, takes as its subjects three cotton tenant families from Hale County, Alabama. Reparation focuses on the three mothers, reworking their dresses by stitching photographs of fabric that have been sampled from Evans’ original images. In an effort to articulate the slippage between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, each process inspires the other. The dialogue between the two explores notions of materiality, unpicking the histories and fictions embedded within the image to construct another layer of looking.