JULIA POMEROY

Julia Pomeroy (b.1998) is an oil painter from London. She is currently studying an MFA at City and Guilds London School of Art and has been awarded the Leverhulme Scholarship to fund her course. She was based in Leeds for the last six years, and was previously a studio holder at Assembly House, Armley. Pomeroy graduated from Leeds Arts University's BFA course in 2020 with a First-Class Honours.

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"In my painting practice, I explore the impact of living in the artificial age on human psychology. Through abstracting painting processes, I create a feeling of hyper-existence juxtaposed with scenes of figures in our everyday life and in nature. I combine these elements with my interpretation of the contemporary world- almost like a filter overlaying seemingly mundane scenarios and physical experiences.

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I create a sense of artificiality through a vibrant, heated and acidic colour palette that emulates romantic sunsets and warning signs simultaneously. Through my work I analyse the relationship between painting and the digital; I deploy hidden tropes that evoke Photoshop tools like ‘layers’, or which suggest superimposed elements of realism or pixel-esque gradients.

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Looking at the work up close, the viewer can see expressive, painterly oil marks hovering over blurry acrylic grounds, playing with the different layers. These different layers act as a metaphor about what human connection means today in an increasingly disconnected world. This is also analysed through the narratives that I suggest and the settings my figures are found in and through the use of symbolic imagery- such as plants or digital tech or capitalist consumables. An overall emotional feeling conveyed through  the use of distracting, bright colours.

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Inspired by digital photos of personal experiences, found online imagery, pop culture and art history, my work aims to analyse what the contemporary sublime is and find something that can exist between being primal and sci-fi.