Julia Wilmot

Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, ceramics, photography, and printmaking. My practice is driven by curiosity, about materials, perception, and the ways images can hold both precision and imagination at once. Moving between media allows me to ask questions through different physical and visual languages, and to explore understanding, both perceived and implied. I create because it is necessary: a conversation, a passion, and a search for what the world can give.

Across all media, I value process as much as outcome. I work between control and surrender, allowing material behavior, water, clay, light, or pigment, to inform the final image. My practice is rooted in careful observation, experimentation, and a belief that making is both an inquiry and an act of devotion. Through my work, I seek to create images that linger, asking viewers not only what they see, but what they feel and believe. Much of my process includes contemplation, review, deep thinking, and continual reevaluation. While art can mirror the beauty of life, I am equally drawn to its ability to reflect life’s chaos and complexity, something I strive to express visually in my work.

Much of my recent work explores beauty, nature, and power: how it is seen, felt, constructed, and mythologized. In my ongoing series What Is Power?, skyscape paintings featuring dragons and turbulent weather juxtapose natural phenomena with fantastical imagery to create space for reflection. Power may appear as the force of nature, the presence of a creature, the act of creation, or something unknowable and unseen. Rather than offering answers, these visual pairings invite a contemplative dialogue, asking where meaning and authority reside, and how imagination reshapes our understanding of them. In a very different way, my series Endangered Species of North America uses solely ink, through lines and dots, to depict animals facing extinction. The hours spent stippling each creature are insignificant compared to the natural and human-made forces threatening their survival. My ongoing photography practice often focuses on the things unseen or under appreciated. Whether it be portraits embracing the fears of its subject, or still lives of the mundane, I search for significance in the smallest of ideas.