Exhibition

Julie Cockburn: Balancing Act

9 Sep 2020 – 25 Oct 2020

Regular hours

Wednesday
11:00 – 19:00
Thursday
11:00 – 19:00
Friday
11:00 – 19:00
Saturday
11:00 – 19:00
Tuesday
11:00 – 19:00

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The Photographers' Gallery

London, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • Just off Oxford Street so accessible by bus services to Oxford Street and a 2 minute walk from Oxford Circus Tube Station.
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Julie Cockburn is renowned for re-imagining and re-configuring found objects and vintage photographs into meticulously constructed and unique contemporary artworks.

About

The new works on display in Balancing Act, Cockburn’s third solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, are rich in landscape, domesticity, and the human form, altered by Cockburn’s playful language of abstraction and intervention.

What at first appear to be almost random, flippant scrawls or slaps of colour, are in fact painstakingly and perfectly stitched and set into the original found photographs using impressively assured composition. Large black and white scenes of epic wilderness are surrounded by smaller, soulful, homespun album photos, and abstract shapes come bouncing into conventional, picturesque landscapes, interrupting the scenic tranquillity. Pastoral idylls are subtly altered by collage and tentatively edged by playful daubs of exquisitely crafted embroidery, and in the new Skaters’ series, graphic embroidered compositions almost entirely obscure images of skating figures, amplifying the balance between the exuberance and tension of performance.

Cockburn made the majority of work in Balancing Act during the recent lockdown. Whilst none of the work overtly refers to Covid-19 it is, says Cockburn, impossible now to look at the work without seeing it through the lens of the pandemic.

Julie Cockburn, said: “Balancing Act is an exhibition of works I made before, during and after Lockdown. I live on my own and work from home, so little overtly changed in the logistics of my day-to-day life. Like everyone, I carefully negotiated my way through the news bulletins and supermarket aisles, cautious not to become overwhelmed with the enormity of the pandemic. While in isolation, I noticed how much we connected by sharing our creativity on social media in an act of showing and being seen – our bread, our gardens, our dances, our cardboard animated projects. This is my show and tell.”

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Julie Cockburn

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