Julia Babb

Julia's website


Julia's Artist Statement:

I am on a search and create mission! I have been exploring and working in the artistic forms of movement, calligraphy, and photography. My abstract photographic work centers on layering the reflective, distorting, and transparent qualities of glass and light. My Physicalligraphy concept involves making very large, "me-sized" letters (holding a very large sponge in my hands as the 'nib', I am then the 'pen') to much smaller letters, layered over one another, or aligned so that the meaning of the text changes or becomes, in fact, meaningless. I have also discovered that there is a corollary grace in the movement of making large letters to the movements of Tai Chi, and I want to move in such a way that also suggests that I myself am calligraphic—an ink mark on the world, a message in my own right.
I enjoy finding ways to pull photography off the wall, getting it out into the middle of the room where it can be engaged with, both physically and conceptually. I am pushing movement by combining it with these historically more static forms, and pushing both photography and calligraphy by blurring the distinction between text and images. I am pushing all three forms by finding ways to digitize them. I just discovered Chroma Key paint for instance with its videographic capacity to provide a ground for embedded images. I am curious if it works while wet, and how that might change the appearance of the letters or images. I also want to use conductive fabric, to which LEDs can be sewn in letter shapes, and then messages or meaning can be controlled remotely.
I am currently investigating questions regarding the left brain/right brain dichotomy, the movement and growth of language, living the question of dualism while inhabiting the middle, spiritual healing, paradoxical thinking, and change. At the moment, I am reading three books which are representative of the directions I am taking in my work and in my development as an artist: Pema Chodron's Comfortable With Uncertainty, in which she proposes that we align ourselves with change instead of resisting it; Stuart Heller's The Dance of Becoming: Living Life as a Martial Art, which explores movement as a path to wholeness; and Derm Barrett's The Paradox Process, a book that addresses creative problem solving through oppositional, juxtapositional and integrational thinking.

Contact Julia at juba423@gmail.com