Now in its 44th year, Australia’s premier printmaking prize, the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award returns with a spectacular new showcase of prints and artist’s books from a selection of established, emerging and cross-disciplinary artists from across the country.
And Julie Mia Holmes of Moruya is one of the finalists with her work Anchorless, which Julie describes as a reductive monotype featuring floating seaweed holdfasts and other flotsam and jetsam collected from the tideline.
Anchorless
“I get lost in the tiny details. Little goose barnacles, broken shells and tiny mollucs caught up in the heads of dried seaweed, like stars in a cloudy constellation. They have come unstuck, tossed about in high seas and washed ashore: a metaphor for the relationship most of us have with own environment, untethered, disconnected.”
“I love the contradictory nature of monotype, it is one of both erasure and creation.”
Not content with just the pursuit of one Major Printmaking art prize Julie also entered the Peebles Print Prize 2019 to be selected as a Finalist.
The Peebles is a significant print prize that is representative of the highest level of printmaking in Australia, solely focused on the intaglio technique.
Julie has entered a piece titled Celestial Nudibranch, an etching with tusche wash, aquatint and chen colle.
Celestial Nudibranch
Above: Julie lives at Moruya Heads and when not working at Moruya Books you can regularly find her fossicking the shoreline for flotsam and jetsam. She studied Printmaking and Drawing with Honours at the ANU’s School of Art in Canberra and has since exhibited in solo and group shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Queenscliff. Julie has been a finalist in the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize and the Basil Sellers Art Prize, twice. She also makes a mean guacamole.
For those interested in learning the art of printmaking you can join Julie Mia Holmes in a weekend workshop over October 12th and 13th at Megalo in Kingston ACT exploring etched and carved linocut.
Julie says of the weekend “Etched lino is a fantastic way to combine intaglio and relief processes with the option to ink the plate as you would an etching, roll it up as a relief print, or both!
“I will guide students through different techniques to control the marks etched on the block, such as blocking out with grounds, or more painterly methods with brushes and other mark making tools. Students will also be shown how to carve into the block to add another dimension to the image.”
You can enrol here http://www.megalo.org/learning/linocut-etching
Coming up in Moruya: the Eurobodalla council will be running a series of Literary Salons in October at the Bas Gallery and Julie will be showing a piece she has made in response to a Sonnet local author and artist Jennifer Hawkins has written.
