Julie Rrap interviewed in Ocular by Jennifer Higgie. In the interview Rrap discusses the evolution of her latest commission - a double cast of her body in bronze - and evaluates its place amongst four decades of feminist practice.
Rrap is the recipient of the 2024 Melbourne Art Foundation Commission. Her work, titled 'SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders)', is a life-sized bronze sculpture that will be unveiled at Melbourne Art Fair next week, before travelling to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) where it will be included in Rrap's solo show, 'Past Continuous', opening in June 2024, and later to its permanent home in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
JULIE RRAP & JANET LAURENCE Feature in Artists' Artists Podcast
JULIE RRAP & JANET LAURENCE were interviewed by Jennifer Higgie for the National Gallery of Australia's podcast 'Artists’ Artists', a five-part series connecting audiences with works of art from the national collection through the lens of contemporary artists.
The podcast invites audiences to learn more about some of the treasures and lesser-known works in the national collection, as well as gain insight into the personal life experiences and stories of Australian and international artists.
Episode 1: Julie Rrap
Julie Rrap is an Australian artist who was born in 1950 and lives in Warrang/Sydney. She has 15 works in the national collection, including multiple works from her monumental Persona and shadow series 1984. In this episode, she speaks about works of art by Sol Wiener, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Moffatt and Yukultji Napangati.
Episode 4: Janet Laurence
Janet Laurence is an Australian artist who was born in 1947 and lives in Warrang/Sydney. In 2020-21, her work was included in National Gallery exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now: Part One. Laurence has nine works in the national collection, including the large-scale installation Requiem 2020. In this episode, she speaks about works of art by Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Rosalie Gascoigne and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.
JULIE RRAP work 'Drawn Out' acquired by the National Gallery of Australia
Drawn out (2022) is one of Julie Rrap’s most recent performative self-portraits, the latest in a performative project that began almost fifty years ago.
The work, which is in effect a life drawing, comprises a video-performance of Rrap – shot from above, naked and holding a stick of Conté crayon – drawing on a large sheet of paper, moving under instruction of an unseen supervisor. Over a 12-minute period, Rrap’s body and the sheet of paper become covered in black marks as artist, body, sheet and drawing merge in a neat riposte to the way the genre of the nude, and life drawing in particular, usually position the artist and the naked subject. Together, the drawing and the video-performance produce a compelling, feminist self-portrait that is at once poetic and full of pathos. Key to the work’s disruptive power is the fact that this is the body of a 72-year-old woman, whose body we have looked at in the process of making art and ageing since the late 1970s.
JULIE RRAP finalist in the 2023 Dobell Drawing Prize
Congratulations to JULIE RRAP, who is a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize 2023.
National Art School presents the Dobell prize, which celebrates contemporary drawing.
Rrap’s video work ‘DRAW OUT’ is a brilliant investigation of drawing ‘the nude’:
“The drawing is a kind of haptic expression as a naked Julie Rrap rolls back and forth over paper secured to the floor. Here she marks the parameters of her body in charcoal. She can’t actually see her body as one entity in this process, it is not an object of her gaze. What we see is the writing and erasing of a body in pieces, a fragmented body, a body that wears the erasure of the drawing on its skin.” @annemarsh56, 2022
All finalists will be on show at the NAS Gallery until 10th June 2023.
JULIE RRAP, ‘Drawn Out’, 2022, video, 12 min.
JANET LAURENCE Artist Talk 'Artists on the Ice: Interpreting the Poetics of Antartica'
ARTISTS' TALK
Across an evening of storytelling, performance and conversation, JANET LAURENCE will join a panel of four exceptional artists who have documented the power and beauty of Antarctica.
Moderated by the wonderful JULIE RRAP, in her role as Director of Sydney College of the Arts, this talk at the University of Sydney is not to be missed! Other panellists include Alice Giles AM, Professor Jean McNeil, and Dr Diana Chester.
Thursday, 20 April 2023, 6PM. This is a free event, but registration is essential, and seats are going fast! Register on the @sydney_uni website.
JULIE RRAP features in Harper's Bazaar Australia
"[There] is this invisibility around the ageing female body, and it almost sends the message that a post-reproduction body doesn’t have any purpose.”
Early in 2022, Rrap exhibited her new video series DRAWN OUT at ARC ONE for the first time. This significant body of work halted audiences in their tracks:
“I think it’s the first show I’ve done where people, both male and female, were just completely absorbed by watching these videos,” she says. “It was almost like they were hungry to see this footage of an older woman drawing herself naked.”
Visit ARC ONE Gallery today to see this powerful piece in our Viewing Rooms.
JULIE RRAP 'Hairline Crack' Installed at AGNSW
Julie Rrap, 'Hairline crack', 1992, acrylic glass and hair, Installation dimensions variable.
It is fantastic to see JULIE RRAP'S key work 'Hairline Crack', 1992, installed among the permanent collection display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Rrap first presented 'Hairline crack' in the 9th Biennale of Sydney. From a distance, the artwork resembles a black line drawn on the wall, evoking, perhaps, the work of Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner or other artists associated with minimalism. On closer inspection, however, it is quickly discovered that the line is in fact made from an unruly excess of human hair.
The work might be seen to meditate on the tension between the organic and the synthetic or between order and chaos. The perfectly straight, level line reveals itself to be disrupted by something organic and unpredictable; a part of our bodies associated with beauty that is also cut and discarded.
JOHN McDONALD on JULIE RRAP at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
John McDonald published a perceptive review in the Sydney Morning Herald today, writing on Sebastian Goldspink's "pioneering" curation of the current Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at AGSA, which includes a focus on JULIE RRAP. Importantly McDonald pays homage to the late, great artist Hossein Valamanesh and visionary philanthropist Neil Balnaves, who are both dearly missed by friends and colleagues in Australia and abroad.
McDonald concludes with glowing praise of JULIE RRAP's installation, writing,
Julie Rrap, now one of the elders in this group, takes a more direct approach, with a multi-channel video installation called Write Me (2021-22), which features 26 images of her own face, laid out like the letters on a keyboard ... One can only admire Rrap’s bravery in creating so many self-portraits in which she has added years and wrinkles to her own face. It’s simultaneously an embrace and a defiance of the ageing process. In the context of this Biennial, in which the older artists seem to have produced the best, most coherent work, it’s also a testament to the value of experience.
READ MORE here
JULIE RRAP in the spotlight in 'The Exhibitionists', ABC TV
JULIE RRAP in 'The Exhibitionists' on ABC IVIEW now
Did you catch JULIE RRAP’s interview on ABC’s wonderful programme ‘The Exhibitionists’? Four art lovers prowl the National Gallery of Australia after dark, and discover the artist behind the celebrated Know My Name exhibition. Watch now on IVIEW.
New interview with JULIE RRAP
JULIE RRAP recently spoke with Kerrie O’Brien from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald about her photographic series ‘Blow Back’, currently on view at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. This series continues her observations on the representation of women in art and society ——“In advertising, women often have their eyes closed and their mouths slightly open, it’s like this vacant entry point.”
“I always argue that the portrait is always more about the person looking at it than the person being photographed,” Rrap shared in the interview, “When you photograph somebody, it’s like this awkward moment when you have this existential crisis about who you are...while a portrait carries all this weight, it’s just a moment in time. Photography captures a fraction of a second of you but fixes you in time… They could be thinking about what they had for breakfast."
Read the full interview here. ‘Blow Back' is on display Centre for Contemporary Photography as part of the exhibition ‘We, Us, Them: CCP x Belfast Exposed’ until 17 April.
JULIE RRAP at the ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART
JULIE RRAP’s newly commissioned and major installation, Write me, 2021, is currently on display in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
“For Julie Rrap, technology, albeit still fraught, may ultimately provide us with a space for shared experience and accountability. Write Me (2021) examines the social contract of the public sphere. In a career that has often returned to the body as a site of action and politics, recent times have reduced Rrap to a constrained and warped vision of their familiar face. 26 times over, across a keyboard shaped grid, with its familiar, specific alignments, play out 26 versions of the artists face, each representing a letter of the alphabet.”
— Bradley Vincent, AGSA.
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Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: ‘Free/State’ is on view until 5 June.
Learn more via @agsa.adelaide bio or visit
Art Guide interviews JULIE RRAP
JULIE RRAP, Drawn Out [installation view at ARC ONE], 2022, video, 12 minutes.
Art Guide writer Briony Downes sat down with JULIE RRAP to have a conversation on women’s liberation, feminist representations and the inspiration of her new video work ‘Drawn Out', which was a highlight of her recent solo exhibition at ARC ONE.
“I imagined it as a playful gesture where the traditional nude female life model draws herself. Now, seeing Secret Strategies, Ideal Spaces together with Drawn Out, I think there is a fantastic conversation across time; not only because my body is 35 years older but because it has liberated me from having to perform historical works. Now I am simply drawing for myself. The active quality of the video also animates the stillness of the early photographs.”
READ MORE in Julie Rrap on women’s liberation, performance and being a trickster
JULIE RRAP AWARDED FELLOWSHIP IN NSW GOVERNMENT
Congratulations to Julie Rrap, who is one of five successful fellows in the NSW Government's Fellowship program!
The New Dimensions: NSW Visual Arts (Established) Fellowship will support Julie Rrap with funding to allow her to focus on a self-directed professional development program, and also to undertake an additional project or acquisition commission from the MCA. This marks the third year of a partnership between Create NSW and MCA for the New Dimensions: NSW Visual Arts (Established) Fellowship.
The opportunity for Julie Rrap to develop a new body of work and program of research with the Fellowship is significant. This research and artwork will question how we “look” or “look away” when confronted by certain bodies. This is a very timely project for Rrap and an extension of a meaningful practice centred around challenging and questioning traditional expressions of the female body.
Portrait of Julie Rrap in her studio by Jacquie Manning
JULIE RRAP CURATES 'THE OTHER PORTRAIT' AT UTS
![Julie Rrap & Cherine Fahd, Give and Take [video stills], 2021, 4 channel video work;](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54012345e4b0f72d40b6c44e/1623993524054-S7GXSI6I1ELH2FEP4BW8/TOP4.jpg)
Julie Rrap & Cherine Fahd, Give and Take [video stills], 2021, 4 channel video work;
Curated by Julie Rrap and Cherine Fahd, The Other Portrait has just opened across UTS Gallery and SCA Gallery.
Featuring new work by Julie Rrap, this exhibition brings together work by artists who have an established relationship to the concept and traditions of portraiture. Through existing and newly commissioned works, the exhibition provokes a new analysis of the self and the other and examines the ways artists draw on their bodies, families, communities, cultures and experiences to underscore the paradoxes of subjectivity. Located across two spaces – UTS Gallery and SCA Gallery – The Other Portrait proposes the self and the institution as sites in conversation.
More information >
PANEL DISCUSSION
Join Julie Rrap, Cherine Fahd, Rachel Kent, Lee Wallace and Patrick Pound for an afternoon exhibition viewing and discussion moderated by Stella Rosa McDonald.
JULIE RRAP'S FULL SERIES 'PERSONA AND SHADOW' AT NGA
JULIE RRAP was interviewed by Brisbane Times about her series ‘Persona and Shadow’ which is now on show in ‘Know My Name’ at the NGA.
When Julie first showed ‘Persona and Shadow’ in 1984, two of the works were acquired my the NGA. Last year, the remaining seven were obtained so that the full suite may hang in ‘Know My Name’. “You think of the whole series as one set of work”, says Julie, “so it’s significant for me, and I think for the institution, to collect substantial bodies of work like that by women artists."
These works were made after Rrap returned from Europe having seen two major contemporary art exhibitions where only one female artist was represented amongst approximately 80 men. In the photographs, Rrap acts out imagery from paintings by Edvard Munch in an investigation of the stereotypical depiction of women in art and, more widely, in society.
Read the full interview with Julie here.
'Know My Name' (Part 1) continues until 4 July 2021.
JULIE RRAP INTERVIEWED ON 'THE ART SHOW'
For those that missed the insightful interview with Julie Rrap on Wednesday, this week’s ‘The Art Show’ is now available to stream via the ABC Listen App and on the web HERE >⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Julie reflects on her formative years as a young artist living in Sydney and Europe, and using her own body in her art practice. “It’s not an identity thing - I’m not an artist who’s trying to reveal something about myself. I’ve often spoken about what I do as more of a trickster, I act as a kind of vehicle,” she says. “When I see myself in an image, it’s almost like the third person - it goes through this transformative process in the making of art. It’s a representation, it’s not me.”
Listen back to hear about Julie’s time working for photographer John Delacour, the evolution of her ‘Overstepping’ concept, her interest in Cindy Sherman’s use of masquerade, and the importance of female role models in the art world.
Swipe through for images of the works Julie refers to in the conversation!
![Julie Rrap, ‘360 degree self portrait’ [still], 2009, digital video, 10:42min](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54012345e4b0f72d40b6c44e/1596765986024-YG4LYTFQM4IA7Z5L613W/Rrap_360+degree+self-portrait+4a.jpg)
MGA 30 YEAR ANNIVERSARY CATALOGUE
'VIEW FINDING Monash Gallery of Art 1990—2020', designed by Pidgeon Ward.
The MGA recently launched a landmark 30 year anniversary publication - VIEW FINDING Monash Gallery of Art 1990—2020.
This fully illustrated catalogue features image plates by ARC ONE artists Pat Brassington, Lyndell Brown & Charles Green, Rose Farrell & George Parkin, Robert Owen, Jacky Redgate, Julie Rrap, Lydia Wegner and Anne Zahalka. It charts the history of the gallery, its present, and the future of photography in Australia.
Over the last 30 years MGA has developed one of Australia’s most important cultural assets — the only public collection solely dedicated to Australian photography. MGA’s artistic program has explored the diversity of photographic practice in Australia, and has placed Australian photographers and photography within a global context. 'View Finding' looks at the past, present and future of photography in Australia, presenting moments that have defined MGA, its collection and exhibition history.
A selection of leading lights who specialise in photography in Australia have contributed essays to the publication. You can purchase it here.
'SHADOW CATCHERS' REOPENS AT AGNSW
Shadow Catchers at Art Gallery of New South Wales is open once again!
EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS, JACKY REDGATE & JULIE RRAP all have works in the this exhibition, which draws on the AGNSW collection to investigate the way shadows, body doubles and mirrors haunt our understanding of photography and the moving image.
There is a fantastic video guide of the exhibition narrated by senior curator of contemporary Australian art Isobel Parker Philip. This was filmed as part of the AGNSW’s Together in Art initiative, which seeks to create meaningful art encounters online.
Eugenia Raskopoulos, installation view of Diglossia seriees in Shadow Catchers at AGNSW, 2020
EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS & JULIE RRAP AT THE AGNSW
EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS & JULIE RRAP are featured in the exhibition Shadow Catchers, opening today at the AGNSW. This exhibition investigates the ways shadows, body doubles and mirrors haunt our understanding of photography and the moving image.
Eugenia's Diglossia (2009) series is on display, along with Julie’s Body Double (2007).
The exhibition runs until 17 May.
JULIE RRAP
JULIE RRAP has put forward a proposal for the AGNSW facade commission. Julie was one of six women artists invited to create a concept for the empty space above the Gallery’s grand entrance, once intended for a decorative bronze panel that was never realised.
In 1913, the Gallery trustees commissioned the expatriate Australian artist Dora Ohlfsen (1869-1948) to sculpt a classical Greek chariot race in low relief for it. Though Ohlfsen worked on the piece for many years and her designs were approved, in 1919 the commission was abruptly cancelled. One hundred years later, the AGNSW is examining the original commission and some exciting contemporary proposals for the space.
In her concept, Rrap uses her own body to engage with issues of representation, gender and power.
Titled Walk out, Rrap’s panel appropriates the legs of five favourite sculptures in the AGNSW collection: those by Ugo Rondinone, Patricia Piccinini, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois & Michael Parekowhai. If developed further, Rrap would perform these figures, acting them out and casting her own legs in bronze.
In Walk out, Rrap uses surreal humour to destabilise. She refers to the relentless imaging of the body - especially the female body - within Western art history. These disembodied legs walk out in protest from the bastion of culture; or do they join our own to reenter the museum confidently, through the front door?
An exhibition of the proposed concepts runs until 8 March 2020.
