Featured Artist Julee Latimer

Artist Julee Latimer weaves with paint, creating colorful three-dimensional artworks. See more of her intriguing process by visiting her website.

 

 

From childhood, I have always been an artist. I worked at various freelance jobs in design (knitwear, interiors and theatre sets) as well as spending many years as a professional mosaic artist. Working with glass and concrete day in and day out was beginning to take its toll on my wrists. At that point, I wrote the book Sculptural Secrets for Mosaic, thus ending one artistic chapter.

 

 

I began to gravitate toward painting, and enrolled at Curtin University, where I completed my BFA in 2019. I took every sculpture and painting unit that was available. Pushing the boundaries of what can be considered a painting was a driving force for me throughout those years. It has become pivotal in my art practice.

 

 

Painting has always interested me, but my interest lay more in what I could make the paint do rather than the picture it could create. I am drawn to the dimensional, the sculptural and, particularly, to the unusual use of materials. I don’t use paint brushes, preferring to let the paint “paint” itself. I’m far more interested with paint as a dry material rather than a wet one.

 

 

I find dried paint fascinating. The ability to see both sides of a painting is something that holds my interest time and again. I feel I am being let into a secret that otherwise would have passed unnoticed.

 

 

Using paint as one might use fabric is part of my process, which involves cutting, fragmenting and weaving.

 

 

I have moved internationally many times. This has often led to feelings of not belonging, as well as a need to exist without support. This plays out in my work through explorations into ways to allow the paint to exist without the support of the canvas. It also influences my need to continually construct and deconstruct the dried material.

 

 

There is a fragility in unsupported paint which I strengthen through weaving. Warp and weft emulate, for me, the way in which social support networks are needed to assist the individual and which, through relocation have a tendency to unravel. Using a craft technique to manipulate paint emphasizes interconnection rather than separation which I find immensely appealing.

 

 

My practice is extremely process based, and I rarely begin with an outcome in mind. Experimenting with paint often yields surprising results which lead to further testing and manipulation. I end up working on several pieces simultaneously.

 

 

Recently, my attention has been focused on the leftover material that each work generates. Initially, this was a response to being in lockdown during the pandemic. Now I find that creating with what would ordinarily be discarded is as exciting as the constructing the original works. Working this way has also enabled me to create more sculptural pieces.

 

 

If paint could speak, it would say to the canvas, “It’s not you, it’s me. I just need my space.”

 

Artist Julee Latimer invites you to follow her on Instagram.

 

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