Like the looping lines that circuit her work, Julia Flanagan’s paintings and sculptures are intricately linked. Drawings may begin as plans for sculptures but then emerge as painting. Zoomed in sections of an earlier work establish a starting point for the new, before the introduction of dynamic ribbons in scintillating patterns.
The latest paintings play more intensely with all these layers. Formats based on the geometry of the quilting square (used by her mother) are a stable background. But with this anchor in place, curlicues then twist in front and around, at times weaving in and out like a needle in motion, a thread bouncing off or negotiating edges. These movements encourage us to then move similarly around the sculptures which Flanagan is now really turning up to the scale of the body. Elevated on specifically designed plinths, they address the standing figure but also speak of the hand, of construction in wood as well as in painting and drawing. The cut-out assemblages breathe into the space with their attuned negative shapes. They feel like aspects of the paintings that have been brought out into another dimension for reflection and clarity.
The Paradise Circus series started with sketches made last year while Julia Flanagan was immersed in home schooling. As she states, “That’s where these more open, layered paintings came from. I’ve done a stack of really little drawings. A painting might come from a sketch that would be half an A4, maybe smaller. They start off quite miniature mainly because I can do that quickly.”
To find shape, Flanagan looks to aspects of the everyday. To get started on drawing she might sit and look around her home studio and find forms from architecture and design that then shift through her generative drawing. One painting references a favourite chair. We might not locate the form of a chair in the final piece, but it offers a sensibility to establish a new compositional thing. Titles for work are similarly open, with references to music that connect tangentially and arise as the artist works.
In Paradise Circus there is delight and dynamism. Flanagan’s work is an extended exploration of visual pleasure but it is a tricky field that she constructs. Forces of wild linear patterns locate a joyous in-between tension, and then circle us back into the space of the body through sculptures that transcribe ovals to spheres and lines into rods and prisms.
In November 2022, Julia Flanagan is a finalist in the Fishers Ghost Prize. She won the Georges River Sculpture Prize in 2019 and has shown at Sydney Contemporary in 2020. Also in 2020, Flanagan collaborated with the Gorman (Textile and Fashion Design) brand. This is her third solo exhibition with The Egg & Dart.
Words by Melody Willis