Julie Cockburn - Bridging the generation gap

23rd June 2008

Bridging the generation gap

Julie Cockburn's first solo show with Forster gallery, a beautiful body of work including two installations by the artist. A catalogue is being produced for this show including an essay by Ben Cranfield.

Hundreds of neat stitches obliterate a face, silence a paper mouth. An area of a discarded print is somehow made more brilliant, rendered fresh and new, shining and bright against a dulled faded background. Across the folds of a well-worn map the embroidered outlines of birds seem to question the hierarchy of legible space identified by the cartographer's lines. Mother and daughter inhabit each other's bodies with the eerie three dimensionality of a pop-up book. All of these situations are created by Julie Cockburn from a potent mixture of nostalgia and pathos for the neglected and the trashed. They are rendered uncanny, even magical, by the artist's staccato process of intuitive response and laborious intervention.

The materiality of these pieces is crucial to their seductive and unnerving quality. Cockburn's materials are in themselves marginalised things, problematic things - plasticine, embroidery thread, sticky back plastic, tissue paper. However the materiality of the found objects is also crucial, the certain over saturated, deeply contrasted quality of reproductions in old books or the dusty but still iridescent feathers of a bird immortalised by the art of taxidermy. This kind of junk shop, e-bay rejectamenta may have now fully entered our language of irony and shameless appropriation however, Cockburn strives to avoid irony, side-stepping it by the variety and precision of her processes.

Whilst an implicit awareness of the confines of expectation and taste, gendered and class based languages of decoration and craft are central to the innate politics of the work, first and foremost, these are exquisite meditations on creativity and memory; the possibilities that lie at the heart of personal and collective languages of reference. In Ego Ego, (1970 - 2008) Cockburn has meticulously copied a child's drawing. Two image/objects now sit side by side, one is the smooth, easy, unselfconscious abstraction of a child's hand, a confident hand working in watery paint. Its twin is a tight, textured thing replicating its innocent sibling with painful detail and envious reverence. This is the dual aspect of memory that at once celebrates and rarefies the original event, rendering it magnificent in it's remembering, whilst in that moment of recollection, irrevocably changes and damages the original. And so here Cockburn's own childhood drawings which are now rediscovered as acts of genius by the artist, who is always trying to recover that forever lost freedom, are taken out of context and reanimated, brought to life under the admiring gaze and yet, simultaneously altered, perforated, obliterated forever more with a new memory. Just like the stuffed birds, allowed through artistry to stay forever in their Dorian Gray like prime, so too the personal memory of a childhood drawing or the collective recollection of a Hollywood starlit is petrified, even annihilated through exaltation, burning attention and incising adoration.

Julie Cockburn's pieces are elaborate, intriguing and beautifully executed, with an autonomy that makes one want to believe their existence. Her work is in both public and private collections worldwide. She lives and works in London.

Ends 5th July 2008