About

My current work is part of a lifelong relationship with artmaking in different media which began in pre-school: standing painting at an easel is one of my earliest memories. My work combines this with my  experience as a Jungian psychoanalyst and art psychotherapist and in the context of my unconscious and conscious relationship with the troubled times in which we are all living.

Since my undergraduate Fine Art training I have been drawn to two distinct aspects in art: the traces of the artist’s gesture that can be particularly found in expressionism and the colour of the French impressionists and post-impressionists. I find myself responding to work where the artist’s hand is evident through brushstroke and graphic marks on paper and canvas, and with textured surfaces in ceramics. Over time my creativity has been most sustained and energised within relationships – between myself and other people, and between myself and the artmaking in which I am immersed.

After years of investigating the possibilities of clay, a dream led to my making a series of ceramic handbags. One day I turned a clay handbag-in-formation upside down and accidentally found a shape evoking Palaeolithic and Neolithic stone carvings. Excited with this idea which resonates with my experience of the early and unformed mind/body emotional states that arise in the consulting room, I began experimenting and soon developed a series of ceramic figures to represent internal states and relationships.

Subsequently, I wondered if the human-body-to-clay-body experience of working in clay might be translatable into two-dimensional drawings. After some experimentation I found a medium which allowed me to work body-to-paper, directly manipulating cold wax, graphite dust and pure pigment in order to explore a similar sensorial and material relationship to that of working in clay by using my hands: graphite dust, pure pigment and cold wax which I have combined with oil-stick and charcoal, and occasionally, oil paint.

My two-dimensional work is born out of inwardly driven spontaneous gesture; each new image is a leap into the unknown and an exploration with an unknown end. I allow my unconscious embodied responses to reveal themselves through mark-making. In this way, unexpected new layers of meaning emerge. A visual narrative soon develops; that which begins internally becomes seen and known. The demands of the developing image for resolution mean that choices in colour, line and texture become deliberate and conscious. The image develops its own agency and I am forced to enter into a visual reciprocal relationship with it. This relational aspect of drawing chimes with my work as a psychoanalyst and art therapist. Psychotherapy at depth relies on navigating unmapped territory where it is the nature of the relationship between the individuals concerned, as well as their connection with dreams and other images, that generates creative change.

Julia Meyerowitz-Katz

Profile:
https://www.art-mine.com/artistpage/julia_meyerowitz__katz.aspx