Julia Roche: The Low Hum
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Julia RocheGuided, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas198 x 152 cm, 201 x 155 cm (framed)Sold -
Julia RocheBreathing into the night I, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas153 x 122 cm, 156 x 125 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheBreathing into the night II, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas153 x 122 cm, 156 x 125 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheHow it feels to see, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas150 x 150 cm, 153 x 153 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheBreathing into light, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas120 x 100 cm, 123 x 103 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheCloud trail, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas120 x 100 cm, 123 x 103 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheWhat the clouds remember, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas152 x 198 cm, 155 x 201 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheBuoyant gums rise, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas100 x 120 cm, 103 x 123 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheThe low hum, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas120 x 100 cm, 123 x 103 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheRoom to breathe I, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas153 x 122 cm, 156 x 125 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheRoom to breathe II, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas153 x 122 cm, 156 x 125 cm (framed)$8,000
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Julia RocheThe trees remember, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas84 x 107 cm, 87 x 110 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheShifting play of wind, 2025oil & mixed media on cold pressed oil paper130 x 130 cm, 153 x 153 cm (framed)$8,000
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Julia RocheGoing with the wind, 2025oil & mixed media on cold pressed oil paper115 x 130 cm, 138 x 153 cm (framed)$7,500
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Julia RocheThe hush of fog I, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas55 x 75 cm, 58 x 78 cm (framed)Sold
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Julia RocheThe hush of fog II, 2025oil & mixed media on canvas55 x 75 cm, 58 x 78 cm (framed)$3,000
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Julia RocheBefore the sky talks, 2025oil & mixed media on cold pressed oil paper56 x 76 cm, 81 x 99 cm (framed)$2,800
It’s 8am and I’m sitting in the car on the driveway of our farm in rural Western Australia, talking on the phone to Julia Roche. I imagine her tucked up warm in her Wagga Wagga studio, surrounded by rolling hills, the rustle of trees, the low hum of cattle, watching the clouds race past. My view, but different, and three and half thousand kilometres away. We talk about family and land, memory, weather, art. The things that stack up and settle into the layers of a life. What always strikes me is how, for artists like Roche, those layers don’t sit in neat piles. They fold into each other. Life and art aren’t separate, they flow together. And in Julia’s case, that flow is literal: medium, pigment, and feeling moving across the canvas as if blown by wind or swept by memory.
Roche’s latest body of work at Defiance Gallery is an immersive reflection on light as it passes through the natural world: scattering, softening and obscuring. The fleeting moments in the periphery when light dances through leaves, glows behind cloud cover, or dissolves into fog. As she writes, this is a series shaped by "the subtle and shifting effects of filtered light across the canvas" — the visual language of impermanence. And that’s what these works carry. They’re not about trees or clouds or hills. They’re not even about what we see, but how it feels to see. These paintings linger in the thresholds: the moment before dawn, the pause before a shadow lifts, the hush of fog. She’s painting what can’t be held: light in its most fleeting forms, and somehow making it stay, just long enough for us to feel it and to breathe it in.
There is a painterly intelligence at work in her deep understanding of how paint can act like weather. Roche allows her materials to behave with a degree of freedom, letting them pool, drift, and evaporate across the canvas surface. This method reflects the natural processes she’s referencing: the slow dispersal of mist, the weightless play of shadow and air. This is seen in the diptychs Room to Breathe and Breathing into the Night where the trees take centre stage, they have become buoyant almost floating across the canvas with their trunks drawn in delicate charcoal lines as if blown by rolling clouds.
But this is not romanticism. The landscapes Roche paints are alive with uncertainty. They are shaped not just by observation, but by the messiness of life, motherhood, by exhaustion, by climate anxiety, by a persistent undercurrent of vulnerability. The knotty stuff of daily life on the farm. Roche tells me it’s been a tough year for her family and her community. And I hear it in the work. Not loudly, but it’s there as a thread running under the surface. When life is messy and heartbreaking Roche turns to the land, and it gives back. The trees breathe in what we breathe out. The landscape keeps steady. And in return, she paints it, not to capture it, but to feel her way through it.
This breathing in and out is directly reflected in Roche’s studio rhythm. All the works in the series began outside, a process that has become a signature of hers, working in collaboration with environment, in direct conversation with the elements and often in the dark of the night. Brought back to the studio in the light of day the distressed painterly surfaces are worked into rhythmically and slowly, pushing the boundaries of marks and possibility with materials, layers and texture. The result has a weightlessness belying the physical weight of material and time worked into the surface. What I love most is that she doesn’t try to explain it all. She doesn’t impose clarity where there isn’t any. Instead, she invites us into the murky bits. Where light flickers, where memory gets soft at the edges, where the self and the land start to blur. Her work lives in porous places between seen and sensed, between grief and wonder, between holding on and letting go.
Roche’s paintings are the physical form of quiet wonder at the ethereal landscape. To spend time with these paintings is to be gently undone. To feel the pace of the day slow. To feel, maybe, the land breathing beneath you. In a world obsessed with certainty and speed, Julia Roche gives us something else entirely: a space to linger. To notice. To be still. And in that stillness, in the soft light that filters, scatters, and fades, there’s something enduring. A quiet kind of magic. A kind of knowing. A beauty that doesn’t demand attention, but rewards it.
Anna Louise Richardson, Artist/Curator
July 2025
