Julia Phillips
Bio: Julia Phillips was born and raised in Hamburg and is a citizen of Germany and the US. Phillips graduated with her Diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg in 2012 and is the recipient of two DAAD scholarships and several grants including the Dean’s Travel Grant from Columbia University School of the Arts. She has shown her work internationally, including Berlin, London, Vienna, Warsaw, Los Angeles, and New York. Beyond her individual work, Phillips engages in collaborative publications, performances, panels, and translates art-related texts from English, to German.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
What is the overall intention behind your objects?
Omar, I am so glad you are asking me that. How great it would be to answer this question. I have a few thoughts that might give an impression of what could be an answer.
The idea for my tool-reminiscing objects starts with the title. It usually describes an interactive function and a character at once, like Bender or Regulator.
Acknowledging the nature of ceramics, the tools are not functional on a physical or mechanical level, but rather on an imaginary one. I intend for the objects to steer the imagination into a direction where ideas about desire and physical power dynamics might exist. Ideas that in the society that has shaped me seem to be located in a private mind space and seep into a public representation that I often find to be normative, limited, and filled with misrepresentations and stereotypes.
The traces of the body in my objects, such as hand embossments, torso-casts, or footprints are an attempt to represent what is not shown, leaving it open to viewers to complete the work in their mind and add their imagined representation of the body and the action that is missing to the work.
When I was about seven or eight years old, my mother Gwendolyn Phillips told me that I do not need to say everything: “You have your mind for a reason, use it for everything that does not need to be said or acted upon.” That was such a liberating thought. A space of existence was created for anything that did not have a language or a shape through which it could properly be expressed. And in that space different rules seem to apply, where facts, actions, images, and feelings live in another dimension, do not become manifested, and remain in a constant state of potential transformation.
The negative space in my objects is what I intend to be the site for the unsaid and unshaped. It is meant as an invitation for imaginations to meet, not knowing what the imaginations of others are.