Julia Pomeroy is a painter whose practice usually involves large scale atmospheric portrait paintings in oil on canvas. Born in London, Julia currently lives and works in Leeds.
I first met Julia in 2020 when she had completed her degree in Fine Art at Leeds Arts University, and had won a residency at Sunny Bank Mills’s artist studios as part of their Ones to Watch competition for recent art graduates. Since then Julia has continued developing her painting practice, exhibiting her work whilst also working in a gallery and teaching others to paint.
The portraits Julia makes use exaggerated colours and tonal contrasts and feature friends and family in everyday resting poses – looking at their phone, laptop or tv; laying in bed or seated on a sofa, and more recently in her newest works the subjects are part of the natural environment, surrounded by plants and foliage. They have a strong emotional charge, and the subjects exist in a dream-like reality.
Julia is soon returning to London to begin an MA at City and Guilds Art School. Before she leaves Leeds she has created an exhibition Welcome to our home (The Pest Pad) for my micro gallery Compact Contemporary, and I asked her some questions about her work and ideas.
In your new exhibition Welcome to our home (The Pest Pad) you have made work that’s quite different from your usual large scale portrait paintings. You worked with air drying clay to create small items of furniture and creatures (the “pests”) which are installed alongside found objects such as a glass bottle and a seed pod. Can you tell us more about the ideas behind the exhibition, and what it has been like working on such a small scale when your work is usually so expansive?
Towards the end of last year, I finally experimented with a forgotten idea I had: I wished to bring out the furniture featured in my oil paintings to question the dimensions and boundaries between painting and sculpture. I decided to achieve this with air-drying clay as it is an easier medium to try things out with and also for textural juxtaposition of removing the cosy, soft conventions sofas and cushions have. I’ve always had a desire to have some competence with using clay, especially with its rise in popularity and the obsession people show on Instagram for ceramics; from pottery spinning, using air-drying clay or kiln hiring to making wobbly dishes, plant pots and vases, or even polymer clay-earring businesses. This exhibition seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to let my own clay juices flow.
L: The Largest Influence (2020), oil on canvas 100 x 150cm, photo provided by the artist, R: Sofa#3, watercolour on air drying clay, approx 13 x 13 x 6cm.
I’ve always thought it is creatively and mentally healthy to have multiple streams of exploring different artistic disciplines. I had fell out of line of this as I have specialised in oil painting for the last three years, spring boarding off my explorations during my BFA. My current practice of large oil paintings is always accompanied with photograph and drawings in the process; but keeping an open mind for what materials could best execute the overall intentions when creating final outcomes makes a lot of sense to me.
The initial challenge brought about by this opportunity was the sizing of the gallery. Only being under two metres tall in total, with four floors roughly 30cm tall each and a smaller attic space, this clearly wasn’t meant for my painting style and practice, and nor did I really want it to be.
Installation views of Welcome to Our Home (The Pest Pad)
My main concept for this exhibition was to utilise the gallery as a space echoing the characters that inhabitant it and/or creating a sense of a home. The audience will be witnessing a narrative of the focal subjects who are embellished with surrounding objects, lighting and colour. The idea to base this around a moth, wasp, slug and rat made sense with the size of the ‘rooms’ I would be creating, and the specific selection of these creatures I chose reference the work of Lindsey Mendick. Simply randomly discovering small objects in charity, vintage and recycling shops allowed me the freedom to build their home from a playful interior design perspective and left it to chance to decide what objects would ultimately end up in their home. The playing with new materials of clay and found objects, questioning scale conventions and merging these varied and surreal realities, from human to pest, builds this exhibition and has challenged my practice and foundational ideas.
In an interview with Meg Firth for nicepeoplemagazine.com you said that you enjoyed drawing animals as a child so much that you spent your PE lessons drawing them from an illustrated encyclopaedia. Do you think that the animals you made for the Compact Contemporary installation provide you with associations of childhood comfort and escapism? And are they connected to the humans you paint, who are caught up in their own escapism via phone screens or nature walks?
Depicting animals quickly fuelled my obsession with representational art and I greatly enjoyed this when I was younger. With figuring out my professional artistic direction and the daunting realm of what area I would specialise my practice in, I became conceptually cloudy and moved away from depicting animals in my work (unless it was the form a pet with real reference imagery such as if I was completing a commission). I think in hindsight with this show and noticing the use of animals in a lot of contemporary artists work (Lindsey Mendick, Rene Gonzalez, Georg Wilson), the pressure has been taken off what conceptual weight I would expect of and associate with featuring animals, but now I utilise them to bring a sense of magic, escapism and creating a dream-like reality to reflect our everyday existences. This is seen clearly with our pest pals mirroring our contemporary, everyday, human behaviours- reading the paper, hitting weights in our home gyms, or finishing a bottle of red. Hopefully the audience will see themselves in one of our small friends.
Can you tell us a bit about your influences and inspiration, such as other artists you admire, or wider reference points?
My practice has previously explored celebrating, dissecting and reflecting upon the everyday and creating idealised and introspective realities for humans, but taking inspiration from Lindsey Mendick’s Till Death do us part that I saw at the Hayward Gallery’s Strange Clay exhibition, I wanted to showcase the shared spaces between a runaway rat, slug, moth and wasp from her installation. Her piece shows our familiar domestic settings in an eerie and dark atmosphere, infested with these creatures taking part in our lifestyles of reading on the sofa, washing up in the kitchen sink, or tending to the flowers in a vase (some more gruesome and true to how these pests act in our reality). However, I liked the idea of developing the narrative of a select few of these creatures wishing to leave the colonies, live in the tiny space of this gallery and find their independence. Some of my favourite works of hers are the ROT series also. And I found this nice article from the exhibition saying how ceramics can improve your mental health:
Studio Ghibli’s acclaimed film The Secret World of Arrietty – a retelling of The Borrowers by Mary Norton mirrors with this exhibition as we see our new friends interact with some everyday objects which are ‘normal’ sized and scaled to humans but of course take over their small rooms in strange ways. I’ve blended this with some objects such as sofas and pictures on the wall being the correct scale to the creatures in their individual spaces on each floor, as featured in the Arreittys’ own house, and then later in the film their newly refurbished and quickly installed golden kitchen stolen from a doll house. I’m conveying these ‘vermin’ as becoming socially acceptable citizens and contributors to a new and wider community.
What are you looking forward to about beginning your MA at City and Guilds?
I’m thrilled to be starting my MA at City and Guilds this autumn. It’s a fantastic specialist arts institution who pride themselves on close relationships to tutor their students, progressing their critical thinking and professionalism while becoming a full-time artist. The facilities are brilliant, I am bound to get carried away making as many things as possible during the year I’m there. I feel like I’m at a strong start to my artistic career, with the amazing support and opportunities I’ve found during my time at Leeds, through my time at university to the wonderful people building the art scene here, and this MA will be the lunge I’ll need into the abyss that is art world and I greatly look forward to it.
Do you have any other exhibitions in the near future you would like to mention?
I am exhibiting a painting in a wonderful show at Left Bank Leeds for International Women’s Day [8th March], showcasing women and non-binary artists based in Leeds and it is open from March 4th until April 2nd.
My next show I’m working towards is a solo exhibition at Assembly House Studios coming this August, which will be back to featuring the huge ol’ paintings! Maybe my new vermin friends will be featured in some of those works.
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Welcome to our home (The Pest Pad)
By Julia Pomeroy at Compact Contemporary
Sunday 5th March to Saturday 25th March
Compact Contemporary is a micro gallery in a repurposed tool shed, and shows work by emerging contemporary artists.
Follow @compactcontemporary on Instagram to keep up to date with opening times and to see invites to exhibitions
The new micro gallery is in Helen’s studio space at @spinningmillstudios which is a shared space with many other creatives, and so the opening times will vary.
The gallery is accessible by lift.
Welcome to our home (The Pest Pad) is open for drop in visitors on
1pm-3pm on Sunday 5th March the exhibition opening, all welcome
10am-2pm on Thursday 9th March
12noon-2pm on Wednesday 22nd March
Or by appointment between 5th March and 22nd March please email mylittlehelen@yahoo.co.uk to make an appointment in advance.
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