Thetis, teach me how., 2025

I have drawn upon the work of Julia Kristeva who suggests, creation is entangled with abjection, and where the sacred and profane collapse into one another. The maternal body is not represented here as idealised or sacrificial, but as a contested terrain. Sexual, independent, surrendered, wounded, mythic and ordinary. Thetis, mother of Achilles, appears in my work as a reference point for thinking through the paradox of care: devotion to something knowing its inevitable finitude. In making this work, I am concerned with how maternal experience is negotiated through ambivalence, fragmentation, and contradiction, a space where sexuality, grief, and endurance intersect.

Julia-Rose van Haren is an Australian lens-based artist and writer living and working on Jinibara Country. Utilising multiple genres and forms, her practice explores the body, ecological intimacy and queer feminist theory.

Julia’s play Samson premiered at Belvoir St Theatre and La Boite in 2015, earning her the highly regarded Philip Parsons Fellowship. Julia holds a BFA from QUT and an MFA in Writing from NIDA.
Drawn to care and connection, Julia later completed a Bachelor of Nursing Science while living in remote Central Australia. She continues to work in both emergency and palliative care settings. This clinical experience shapes her art: tender, unflinching, and attentive.

Between 2019-2024 Julia gave birth to three children- one in hospital, two at home. Birth continues to inform her practice, which circles around the body as a site of rupture, knowledge, pleasure, ritual, and abjection. She weaves personal and ancestral histories through image and text.

Working with analogue traditions of image making, Julia has been featured multiple times in Best of PhotoVogue, and she was a semi-finalist in the 2024 Head On Photo Festival. In 2025 Julia was awarded a Sub Tropic Studio Residency through the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Julia’s work has been published by Currency Press and PlayLab Inc, and her poetry has appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal.

Julia’s practice is porous and alive existing at the intersections of art, mothering, and care.