b. 1989, Adelaide, Australia
Lives and works in Adelaide, Australia
Julia McInerney’s practice centres around the combined application of the literary order of words and the sculptural order of physical materials. The dialogue between these two languages is aimed to manifest variations of a third language that is suspended between these two, that is distinct from those that allowed for its origination, yet which at the same time continue to support its existence. The title and material description of each work are intended to perform key roles in this process.
Julia McInerney is an Adelaide based artist, graduating from the Adelaide Central School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) in 2011. Her work is concerned with the ambiguous poetry of objects and materials, often drawing upon ideas and themes from Modernist literature. Julia has presented exhibitions at Greenaway Art Gallery (SA), Constance ARI (TAS), Bus Projects (VIC), the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia’s Project Space, FELTspace (SA), and Konstfack University College of Arts and Crafts, in Stockholm, Sweden. Julia has undertaken residencies at Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin, SIM (The Icelandic Association of Visual Arts) in both Reykjavik and Berlin, and Artspace in Sydney.
JULIA MCINERNEY
THE GARDEN 2018
ARCHIPELAGO 2017
TARRAWARRA BIENNIALE 2016
CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2015
MISCELLANEOUS
THE GARDEN
ACE OPEN
2018
ARTIST NOTES -
Building on McInerney’s celebrated previous works, the exhibition expands on her interest in translation between text and material forms, as well as the symbolic significance of the apple. The Garden comprises new photographic works, hand-carved Applewood sculptures, and a large-scale floor installation of hand-cast concrete tiles, all ordered and contained in a monochromatic vista.
Through her ongoing interest in studies of literature and reading, McInerney approaches Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘reading oneself backwards’ in The Garden. How can our recollection of past events inform our present and future experiences?
ARCHIPELAGO
2017
ARTIST NOTES -
Julia McInerney’s Archipelago, takes as its point of departure the work of 20th century Swiss writer Robert Walser. For this exhibition, the structure of the novel- form serves as a model for the treatment of space. From entering the gallery, to forming a voyage in miniature through the works, to finally departing, the viewer enacts a spatial equivalent of reading a book, whereby a passage is formed between front and back cover, beginning and ending. Archipelago, in particular, explores the shift from typography into topography, engaging in questions of translation between the sculptural and the literary.
TARRAWARRA BIENNALE
2016
ARTIST STATEMENT -
TarraWarra Biennial: Endless Circulation, TarraWarra Museum of Art, curated by Helen Hughes and Victoria Lynn, a collaboration between TarraWarra Museum of Art and Discipline magazine.
My practice centres around the combined application of the literary order of words and the sculptural order of physical materials. The dialogue between these two languages is aimed to generate variations of a third language that is suspended between these two, that is distinct from those that allowed for its origination, yet which at the same time continue to support its existence. The title and material description of each work are intended to perform key roles in this process.
I am interested in the specific, optically generous and open, material capacities of sculpture; I am equally drawn to the hermetic, internally expansive, private spaces of literature. Where these two coalesce, “draw breath from each other,”1 and meet to support one and the same thing, is the space that I work in and towards from work to work.
Marcel Duchamp spoke of titles for artworks as being like an extra colour, “a colour which had not come out of the tube.”2 One could consider this ‘extra colour’ as one that, in a sense, does not exist, reflecting the nature of words, which are like forms, or colours, sealed within the inky blackness of their support, and opened within the reader’s mind.
Traditionally, sculpture was designed to rest upon a plinth. This point of contact between the two would create an area on the base of the sculpture and on the surface of the plinth of literal darkness—a black seam where light cannot enter. Long liberated from the constructs of tradition, a title could be thought of as written with the ‘black ink’ of this sealed surface of a sculpture—performing the role of a seam between the viewer and the view.
1 Linda Marie Walker, email correspondence, 2nd April, 2015.
2 “Marcel Duchamp Speaks” interview with George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton, London, BBC, 1959; published in Audio Arts Magazine 2, no. 4 (1976), quoted in Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 161.