Julie Sundberg: Artist Statement & Bio

"Layered and entangled, Julie Sundberg’s poetic evocations grow from the sense of wellbeing she found during regular walks by the Cooks River, Goolay’yari. These days it is an urban waterway, flowing through a densely industrial suburbia. Yet the waterside footpath provides a surprisingly leafy escape; a healing place beyond the thrum of the human-made. Created during the ongoing period of pandemic that followed the ravages of Australian bushfire, The River draws on a remedial sense of the eternal that, like the waterway’s banks, contains the constant flow of change. Each image results from multiple exposures made in the secluded chamber of the camera, echoing the psychological interior in which the chaotic world of the senses finds its confluence in an affective narrative flow. At one with Nature, we come to recognise that we are but part of an immensely larger whole – a whole revealed most fully in its details. Each twig and ripple a reminder that we are never alone."

Alasdair Foster

Julie Sundberg is a Sydney-based photographic artist, with an academic background in art history and literature.  Julie has decades of experience in education, stills photography, arts management and community work with a longstanding interest in social justice and storytelling.  Her professional life has seen her work with vulnerable people and communities: inmates, the unemployed, the homeless and others relegated to the margins of society. Insight into the human condition takes visual shape in a broad art practice.  In recent years Julie has concentrated on long-term projects related to time, memory and gender.  Empathy for those on the margins runs through Julie’s art practice and in The River it is directed toward the landscape itself.  
 
Julie regularly exhibits her work, and has been a finalist in Australia’s most prestigious photography prizes including the Olive Cotton Award, the Moran Prize, HeadOn Portrait Prize, the Ulrick Award, the National Photographic Portrait Prize, and the Ravenswood Women's Art Prize.  Julie’s work has been published in PhotoWorld, Black and White Magazine, Doingbird, Looking Glass Zine and FotoNostrum Magazine.  Her work is held at HOTA and in private collections in Australia and internationally.   

Zorica Purlija: Artist Statement & Bio

Inspired by her maternal lineage and mother-daughter relationships, the photographic practice of Zorica Purlija nurtures the poetic possibility of human attachments. Often exploring the nuances of vulnerability, her works are an intuitive expression of how we forge connection and care.

 

Purlija’s latest body of work focuses on connection to landscape, exploring the subtle clash of feeling in crashing water and the scrubby bushland of the northern coastal area. She builds visceral surface texture through glitch and superimposition, at once an intervention of traditional landscape photography and an encounter with the multiplicity of sensation.

 

Curator Sarah Rose writes, “The Fall reminds us that we must find respite in nature and question reciprocity and co-existence in order to move towards a more sustainable eco-future in which there is the imposition to heal and become symbiotic with nature, or risk falling into the deep end”.

Zorica Purlija (b. Montenegro) is a contemporary visual artist based on Gadigal land. Working predominately in photography, Purlija’s work is based on attachment and care for the primary relationships and landscape she finds herself in. Informed by a background in graphic and digital media, her photographic practice draws on abstraction and collage to forge an ethereal reflective visual language. Recent exhibitions include Fade Into You, Portraits of Yumi and Transience.

In 2020 Purlija completed a MFA in Photo Media at UNSW Art and Design. She has been a finalist in the Gosford Art Prize (2023), the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2010, 2009, 2008), HeadOn Portrait Prize (2022), the Ravenswood Women's Art Prize (2020), the Fisher Ghost Art Award (2017), the MAMA Photography Prize (2016), the Winifred Bowness Award (2014), the Ulrick Award (2011) and the Olive Cotton Award (2009). She has exhibited in New York, Zurich and Venice.

Zorica Purlija: CV June, 2024 Download