A dream you can touch, 2025

Most recently my works have moved away from looking at the immediate world around me, using shapes, form and colours found in my domestic interior, the urban landscape and architecture. Still using familiar motifs, my paintings and sculptures now draw on my personal library of shapes and language of colour and forms that have been developing in my work over the years. In this series, I’ve been contemplating ideas of contentment, joy and happiness, not referencing the tangible physical world , rather , inquisitively reflecting on how humans feel and how colours, shapes, patterns and forms can be potentially be uplifting, rumina- tive and harmonious. My paintings take shape through making many drawings. With this series the background painting in most of the works have come from a series of miniature colourful pattern designs / drawings intended to be used for repeated textile de- signs. Over these backgrounds I plan a layering of intertwined shapes , colours and forms. I build up multiple layers of acrylic paint. The shapes and forms lay- ered over the patterned background are created by using painters tape to form straight lines and clearly defined shapes and edges. I work often from drawings when taping, sometimes penciling the areas in that I want to section off but some- times I ‘ draw ‘ with the tape, applying it directly to the board in a drawing – like manner, looking back and forth to my concept sketches as a guide to form the areas and shapes.

Julia Flanagan works across painting, sculpture, textiles and drawing. Born in Lake Macquarie, Julia moved to Sydney to study Painting and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2004 and her Painting Honours in 2005. Julia has recently been announce the winner of the 2025 Hawkesbury Art Prize and highly commended in the George’s River sculpture prize. In 2024, Julia collaborated with media artist Miguel Felipe Valenzuela on a large scale interactive 360 degree video installation titled Endless Sunbeams in Another Time at MAP MIMA on Awabakal country for Museum of Art and Culture , MAC Yapang. Julia was commission to make a series of large scale sculptures for exhibition in the gardens of The Hazelhurst Gallery in Gymea, NSW, titled Many Things to Many in 2022. In 2020 she collaborated with Iconic fashion label GORMAN on an extensive collection of clothing adorned with her artwork. She has exhibited extensively in galleries in Sydney, Wollongong, Melbourne and Newcastle, and has works in local and international private and institutional collections. She has been a finalist in many art prizes including Muswellbrook, Waverley , Gosford and in 2019 won the sculpture prize for the Georges River Art Prize.