Julia Blume is a New York based artist working in several media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. She received her MFA from SFAI in 2018, after earning her BA and MA in linguistics from Columbia University and UC San Diego, respectively. Her work has been shown at galleries including Mizuma & Kips, Brian Leo Projects, Youngspace, I Like Your Work, RSOAA, Trestle Gallery, Field Projects, Paradice Palase, Established Gallery. She has also created site-specific installations and performances in a range of environments, including Peru, Iceland, New York City, and Arizona. She participated in residencies with Signal Fire, ChaNorth, and ArtsIceland.

Julia breaks down the false dichotomy of “humans” and “nature” in her work, and she considers the political implications of this artificial separation. Symbolic shape making and interactions with space are used as a way to enter into communication with the various entities of the land. Sculptures reference fungus, insects, and deep sea creatures, but are painted in luminously artificial shades. Organic and highly processed materials collaborate to form ambiguous collectives, which reckon with the entanglement, love, and violence of distilling the natural world into human narrative.  

www.julia.blume.art.com

How has your relationship with art changed over time?

Some years ago, I was mostly making paintings. During that time, I did a series of residencies in wilderness areas, and the tactility and subtle movements of the land really captured my attention. I started getting these intense desires to make something I could hold, something I could live within, a thing that could stand on its own and move in the wind. This is when I started moving more towards sculpture. Paint is still really important in my sculptures, but it now inhabits a very different terrain.
Where do you find inspiration? What drives your work?

Three main things drive my work: sustained bodily contact with land, the logics of fiction and poetry, and art walks near my studio in New York.

What is your favorite part of your process?

There is something really special about the stage where I am finding the underlying forms in the wire. This is where a lot of narratives of inter-species plant communication, hybridity, and reckless symbiosis come up for me, and these are some of my favorite topics to explore.  
What is one thing about your art and/or practice that our audience may not know?

I’m fascinated by what people consider to be natural and what people consider to be artificial. I try to collide those categories against each other and chase the resulting friction. By doing so, the boundary becomes more fluid. One way I do this is by using colors and forms that have been categorized by art history as canonically “natural” or canonically “artificial” and using them in their reverse contexts. I want to push questions like, why is this fluorescent paint not considered natural when it is fully of this Earth? Does it look natural when it’s on a bulbous, undulating form? Why is that? I also play with interiority and exteriority. A sculpture that is coded as very organic and naturalistic in a white cube often looks eerily artificial in a forest. This tells us something intriguing about which spaces we consider to be a part of nature, and which ones we don’t, and what we allow to exist in these rigidly defined spaces.  

Synthetic flowers in particular are really intriguing to me. They are no less a part of nature than flowers grown in soil and water, but they tend to make people really uncomfortable, or a little unmoored. They also frequently exist in liminal spaces like cemeteries, fire escapes, or outdoor restaurants – places people have a hard time classifying as nature or not.    

I blur these categories until the viewer has to ask, if this is all artificial, why did I see it as being about nature? What part of this is natural? It’s not one thing. And maybe it’s all of it. Every part of these sculptures is from the earth, fluorescent acrylic paint included. It’s an entry point into realizing that humans are not artificial beings who sometimes venture out into nature. We’re a particular expression of nature.
What does your dream piece/project look like?

I recently made a set of sky-viewing tubes. These are interactive sculptures where the viewer lies down on the grass and looks up through bright yellow tunnels. The tunnels carve out sections of sky, and act as containers for focused, contemplative viewing of the atmosphere. I would love to make a permanent outdoor version of one of these someday.