Private View & Artist in Conversation with Julia McKinlay and Marion Harrison & SET by DJ Speede Bump.

Julia McKinlay’s practice is a process of discovering a language of sculptural forms. Her work explores the boundaries of the human made in relation to organic and lithic matter. McKinlay’s practice is spatial, she is interested in how objects and images interact in space and form connections with the viewer, sometimes creating imagined worlds for the viewer to explore.

McKinlay’s previous works have represented the surface of a snail’s shell, an obscure garden and the edge of the world, often shifting the viewer’s gaze between two and three-dimensions, translating forms through a generous drawing, print and sculpture hybrid process.

Mutations and evolutions happen as subjects slip across these planes. The incorporation of material processes that mimic geological or biological processes through applying chemical reactions, heat, and pressure allow a real response to the qualities and agency of material that drives McKinlay’s investigative alchemic material practice.

‘Metal is malleable and resistant, pigments bleed and acid reacts. Through interacting with these materials, a body of work emerges.’

For McKinlay’s solo presentation here at Hyde Park Art Club, work shifts away from external subject matter towards capturing specific shapes colours and forms that linger in the artists mind.

‘These forms are a language specific to my practice and my way of processing of the world as I experience it, a conglomeration of moments concretised into something solid’. This new collection of bold printed and drawn matter responds to materials and offers a bodily utterance that can be felt as well as seen. An embodied articulation of Mckinlay’s inner visual language which, seeks to interact and form further connections with the viewer and the space in which they are presented.

‘In ‘Slip Across These Planes ‘ I am presenting a group of new drawings and prints, working principally with paper, pigments and sheet material to explore shape, surface, weight and colour. The artworks  will explore the narrow spatial field of flat materials and how they can be cut, embossed, incised and polished into something that feels absolute.’ 

Julia McKinlay is an artist based in Leeds, UK. Her practice spans sculpture, drawing and print. McKinlay graduated from BA Fine Art: Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art in 2009, and MFA Fine Art Sculpture at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. She completed her PhD by practice at Leeds Beckett University with Yorkshire Sculpture International in 2021. In 2021, McKinlay founded and curated Threshold, an open-air gallery for exhibitions of sculpture in Leeds. She has participated in residencies at AIR 3331, Tokyo; MI-LAB, Lake Kawaguchiko; METAL, Southend-on-Sea; Joya: arte + ecologia, Spain; Listhus, Iceland; Skaftfell, Iceland and has shown extensively nationally and internationally. McKinlay is a Lecturer in Fine Art at The University of Leeds.

www.juliamckinlay.com

@julia_mckinlay

www.thresholdsculpture.space