Throughout December and January, assemblage artist Julia Cooper has had her artworks on display at the Vibewire ArtCycle Exhibition.

This is her story.

From sewing threads as a child to now chiselling off car registration plates for art’s sake, Julie Cooper has followed a creative path to get where she is now. Over the years she has drawn inspiration from the creative practices of her family, “My grandmother was an art teacher and fostered a love for all things arty in my mother and her siblings”.

Her grandmother’s passion hence created a line of artistic talent, one which Julie has inherited, as well as her uncle, who works as an art director for films, “His vast experience and work history inspired me to study design at university and work in the film industry”. From studying art-on-screen she has become inspired to name each of her artworks after famous films, such as Mad Max, The Matrix and Clockwork Orange.

Julie admits to being interested in art for as long as she can remember, yet has only found her niche in assemblage art within the last 5 years. She is drawn to the aethetics of old, industrial materials and their “interesting textures and colours”. In her artworks on display at ArtCycle, there is a strong industrial vibe felt through the repeated collage of silver squares of metal and the solid chunks of old, printing block wood. “The works I create are entirely reliant on the interesting materials I find. The size and amount of materials that I find dictate the style, size and feel of the artworks I create”.

One side of Julie enjoys dealing in the delicate nature of design whilst the other follows in her father’s footsteps, “My father was an engineer and I’ve taken after him, also being handy with tools and machinery that I now use to construct my artworks”. One of her works titled, ‘Bush Mechanics’ took many hours spent in the ‘baking sun’ in order to acquire the many identification plates that create the piece. The manual labour that Julie infuses into her art gives it a genuine feel, offering a sort of backstory behind the simple collage that we are seeing.

Employing a one person’s trash is another’s treasure type philosophy, Julie searches for her materials at garage sales, second-hand stores, antique shops and scrap metal yards. She is an artistic recycler. A creative scavenger. “I create artworks with materials that catch my eye…the materials I use are generally items that have been discarded and are no longer in use. I enjoying giving life and purpose back to items considered rubbish”. It is this thoughful restoration that stirs a beauty within the aesthetics of her works.

Julie’s artworks on display at Vibewire ArtCycle each share different stories with their audience. They are developed from old shoe merchandising signs and fruit box labelling from Tasmania, from former Sydney Gowings store block prints and unused car identification plates. These are Julie’s tools. She gives the resulting product a relative film name, such as ‘Matrix’ which is the title of numbered, wooden blocks that remind her of that movie’s opening sequence (trails of green numerals).

For any emerging artist, it is often difficult to constantly get your works out there, making Julie grateful for the ‘rewarding’ opportunity of exhibiting at Vibewire. She has thrived on her own advice and ‘followed a passion, been open to opportunities and is not afraid to try new things’. Experimentation is at the core of success.

“I like the work of designer Marc Newson, the art of Rosalie Gascoigne, Andy Warhol, Mitjili Napurrula, and the sculpture by Bronwyn Oliver” states Julie, who has effectively carved her own artistic merit into the forgotten items of strangers, and is now looking to exhibit her art more extensively throughout 2010.

If you are interested in viewing or purchasing Julie’s art, please email:

info@vibewire.org

requesting further details or visit the exhibition at

525 Harris St , Ultimo NSW 2007.