Julia Thompson is a Canadian London-based artist who works in sculpture, video and installation, often working with materials that decay, harden, soften, move and transform. She is interested in how the recycling of material can lend itself and move into shifting mediums, until they have exhausted themselves. Which begs the question if materials can ever truly exhaust themselves? Her work often starts with sculpture as a device to explore the notion of an archive. Thompson looks at how things fall apart over time and we try to control these forms of entropy. The catalyst for all the work she makes is an ongoing and ever-growing archive of saved images and letters to people no longer in reach yet persistent in presence. These memories that make up the archive are difficult to fathom in excess.
She often asks: how does the spam take up the foreground becoming the driver? She usually begins from the process of mold making which is to say, I fill a cavity with clear, sticky, stale and soft material - distant from the shape it once filled. The materials that make up her work ultimately act as a container, encapsulating the images and letters they hold, spoiling their core, puffy and disproportionate. As a material made through impact, and a material forever maneuvered around due to its potential of decay, it is charged with risk, alive in impact’s memory. Thomson’s work catalogs the residues of lived experience, elusive and serially shifting – resonant with the acuity of revelation. The sculpture-like containers simultaneously hold and let go, overshare and withhold, responding to temperaments of light, warmth and touch - becoming a memory of a memory, and that
memory is ever receding.
She often asks: how does the spam take up the foreground becoming the driver? She usually begins from the process of mold making which is to say, I fill a cavity with clear, sticky, stale and soft material - distant from the shape it once filled. The materials that make up her work ultimately act as a container, encapsulating the images and letters they hold, spoiling their core, puffy and disproportionate. As a material made through impact, and a material forever maneuvered around due to its potential of decay, it is charged with risk, alive in impact’s memory. Thomson’s work catalogs the residues of lived experience, elusive and serially shifting – resonant with the acuity of revelation. The sculpture-like containers simultaneously hold and let go, overshare and withhold, responding to temperaments of light, warmth and touch - becoming a memory of a memory, and that
memory is ever receding.
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Julia Thompson, Leftovers, Floor Pour Installation, New York, 2019. Image Courtesy of the artist.
Julia Thompson, Valley of the Dolls (2024) at CO,MA, LA. Image courtesy of CO,MA.
Installation view: Julia Thompson at Incubator London, 2023. Image Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view: Julia Thompson, No Archive Will Restore You (2022), solo show, LA. Image Courtesy
Julia Thompson, Future Perfect,(2022), NY. Image Courtesy of the artist.