source: re-title

Conversations is an exhibition of previously unseen, unique works by Julie Cockburn, opening to the public on 23 November. The exhibition opens in conjunction with the artist’s first book publication also called Conversations, published by Tycoon Books in Japan, which will be available from The Photographers’ Gallery bookshop.

.
.
.
.
.
.
source: christopherlittlewood

Julie Cockburn’s embellishment of found paintings and photographs by embroidering, painting and reassembling, delivers the images out of redundancy into a meaningful present. The very stuff of Portraits and Landscapes is, indeed, portraits and landscapes. Hand-tinted studio portraits of the 50s show the persistence of lives recorded in an instant: a mother and daughter, the vignetted emanation of a young girl, soft tones of a movie star, and lush landscapes of mountain and lake provide the raw material. Who are the people in these portraits? Where are these places? Little can be deduced from their mute appearances. A locket necklace shows us little of the sitter’s biography. The mountain range gives no clues of which tarn, loch or lake lies at its foot.

With striking economy Cockburn breathes life into these moribund found images. Simple additional gestures to the original object, or rearrangement of what was already there, are transformative. Usually this transformation goes beyond recognition of the original, and yet nothing is removed: the new image contains, however partially evident, its old image. It remains too, according to the artist, within its genre. Cockburn’s embellishments extend the vocabulary of the images, indicating the limitations of their medium as they pass beyond. Where stitched, for example, sensual texture becomes an adjunct to the visual. Cut and splice in No Means No effects a compelling dynamism of a different order to the conventional single shot portrait.