Julie Jenkinson is a British-born, self-taught multi-disciplinary artist and designer living in Toronto and Northumberland County.
Her artistic practice spans a diverse range of disciplines, including large-scale, site-specific installations, sculpture, assemblage, and self-expressive paintings and drawings. At the core of her creative process lies the habitual impulse to collect and salvage objects. This began when she was a child living in rural Essex County where she and her sister would scour abandoned farm buildings for objects left behind.
Julie has exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions.
In 2018 she held her first solo sculpture exhibition Continued Existence in Toronto at VERSO Gallery/INabstracto. Her work is included in public, corporate and private collections and commissions including: Douglas Coupland, Cutler and Gross, Hanabi Art & Artists, Netflix, The Gladstone Hotel, Taylor Hazell Architects, RH Gallery, TAP Art Projects and Yabu Pushelberg.
Julie’s drawing and painting practice started in the 1990s while living in Brooklyn, NYC. Inspired by the brilliant imagination of New Zealand writer, Janet Frame and her attunement to the sensory world. She was profoundly moved by the way Frame was able to find an inner world of beauty and bewilderment despite her struggles with a tragic life.
Jenkinson began depicting Frame’s narratives in small charcoal drawings. While reading was a constant source of inspiration for her early works on paper, it was through following a deeper state of the subconscious that she has created hundreds of hybrid animals, obsessively, for over 20 years.
In addition to works on paper, Jenkinson’s characters have been applied to surface and pattern design including her Animaze pattern (pajamas, textiles, wallpaper) cards and silkscreen prints showcased at The ICFF, NYC, 2010 and The Design Exchange, Toronto, 2011. Her drawings were included in The Drawing Centre’s Viewing Program, NYC in the early 2000s. Her work is available through Byrd House Gallery and INabstracto.
Artist Statements
Works on Paper
My drawings evolve from memory and imagination rather than direct observation or preliminary sketches. I’m interested in expressing the raw space of my emotion. I love the subversive reality in vintage cartoons as much as the complexity in primitive renderings of animals. I feel a connection to the eccentricity in certain animals. In my work the creatures act out the absurdity and vulnerability in the underbelly of humanity.
Sculpture and Assemblage
Salvaged objects have an unspoken history and memory in their very substance. Transforming them into a novel form and context does not negate this history, but rather, envelops it into a deeper layer of the aesthetic language. There’s an inherent feeling of familiarity that one can’t quite place. While I rarely have a specific vision for found objects’ end use, there’s a feeling, a pull, an inherent pulse and intuition driving me toward their continued existence in new abstract constructions.
