Julia Roche: When our eyes adjust at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery

Julia Roche’s work is guided by nature and by feeling, encompassing the complex relationships between landscape and identity. The work is not about this place, but of it. Julia thinks of it as a form of bearing witness.

Since returning to her childhood home on Wooroola in 2018, Julia has developed a distinct visual language and process for painting the landscape. She begins with a series of diluted-oil washes, undertaken plein-air, which are left to dry outside. Julia has developed this technique after a workshop with artist John Wolseley - it enables her to create the conditions for the wind, the mist, the insects to leave their marks in the understory or underpainting. This weathered composition then shapes a more descriptive and imaginative landscape overstory.

Understory and overstory are words Julia uses to talk about the layering techniques of her paintings. I had not heard this language of plants and tree canopies to describe painting before - it gives a unique insight into the way she thinks of the reciprocal role of nature in her works and the important signifier of trees.

Trees, like the landscape, speak to us of a long and layered history. They signify a time before us, when this land was likely a thoroughfare for the Wiradjuri travelling to important meeting sites. They tell also a more recent history, of thousands of trees planted to create a birdlife corridor; of an old orchard being nurtured back to life; of the shade cast over a daughter’s fairy garden.

This language of trees and stories can also connote the imaginative storytelling of Julia’s paintings. These are not linear narratives, but a collection of stories that coalesce on the canvas; stories of trees bending to drink from waterholes, trees drifting skyward into stars, trees encircling us both in warning and protection. These are powerful trees.

For this exhibition, Julia set out to paint the night. There are two distinct series of paintings within this body of work, paintings made of the night, and paintings made in the night. There is a tension in this back and forth - between control of the materials, and ceding control to the elements; between the understory and the overstory; between the canvas and the paper; between working in the day and working by the moonlight. Julia swayed between these modes of working, allowing each painting to branch into the next.

The first paintings created at night, were made in one fast-paced sitting, with bold brushwork outlining the glow of the landscape under the moon. This is a significant development in Julia’s work, a trusting of her body, a confidence of her mark-making. Julia continued to challenge this process, reintroducing her layering of the understory and the overstory with later night-paintings made across multiple sessions, creating different surface tensions and revealing different stories. Bolder brushwork seeped into the day works, framing the land as the moon does the night.

There is a recurring line in Julia’s works made at night, a hill line, or horizon line. It is easy to imagine this is Picnic hill, standing sentinel on Wooroola, a place from which she often paints. It is as though, without sight, her body is repeating this line, to ground her in this place. The overstory of trees are not present in these works, yet their presence is still felt, in the repeated depiction of the hill on which they stand.

When we first met, Julia shared a story of a trip a few months earlier to Mungo National Park. Together with her family and Gamilaroi man Geoff Simpson, they spent time learning on Country, crushing ochre, sharing intentions. As they sat with new friends around the campfire, a combination of light and smoke formed a ghostly outline of the trees against the night sky. Julia saw the lightness and depth of the night and she brought this way of seeing home.

This experience marked the beginning of this body of work, characterised by a brighter palette, illuminated by moonlight and memory. Moments like this are important, they teach us to pay attention. They teach us to look at our surroundings with intention. When we engage with the places we call home with this kind of critical attention, we challenge what we see, what we know. Our eyes continue to adjust. We learn to rely on all our senses to better understand where and who we are.

Excerpt from the attached exhibition essay by Hayley Megan French