Julie Heaton

Julie Heaton

About

To create is to live. 

Julie is an artist who has been affected by traumatic family loss. In 2009 her husband Carl took his own life leaving her lost and alone, caring for their 2 young sons. 

In an unknown world of grief and sadness, there was an intense need to talk, but what needed to be told felt heartbreakingly unspeakable. 

Through a process of enquiry, explored through drawing and making, Julie endeavours to discover the complicated emotions that lie within the body and the mind. How do the lines that our hands inform translate into ways of knowing who we are and saying what we feel? How do they help us to understand our existence and explain who we are? 

Julie invites people to share their thoughts and their feelings, in a space that is made safe through gentle but impactful art. By provoking conversation through questions that may be both difficult and necessary, it is hoped that a nurturing of the soul can happen for both the artist and the viewer.

Statement

Grief distorts your view, and it complicates the world in which you live. Grief overwhelms, it invades, and it transforms. The body feels despair, and the mind becomes lost. What needs to be said can feel impossible to say and impossible to hear.

The voice will search for unknown words, and then it will choose whether to speak or withhold. The face may faulter and the tears run free, but it may then decide to don its mask and confront the world. The body has no way to control, no way to inhibit how it feels, and no way to decide what it might show. The back will stoop, the head will fall, and the body will feel. 

Intrigued to discover the emotions that lie within, I make to enquire and touch to explore. My body feels known, but the marks that it makes, uncertain.

Process