Details
With a focus on her ecological footprint and creating texture, California artist Julia Goodman forms floating paper sculptures with repurposed materials. Her work dives deep into the painterly and sculptural potential of handmade paper with a series of intertwined, entangled, and expanding abstract forms made of discarded textiles from domestic spaces that have been in direct contact with the human body. Echoing the forgotten history of gleaning rags for paper production, Goodman gathers various colored cotton bedding and t-shirts from her home, friends, family, and thrift stores. Goodman manipulates pulped fabrics against hard exterior surfaces: brick walls, building corners, and concrete pads. Drying in the sun, the pulp absorbs and lifts small fragments off more stable surfaces. The altered personal fabrics shift hard public surfaces slowly over time and challenge traditional definitions of strength and permanence. Each hue is the result of working with the original fabric color or mixing two or more different colored pulped fabrics, without the addition of pigments or dyes.
Goodman incorporates upcycled materials that are both natural and familiar to tell the invisible, essential work of historical and contemporary women. For centuries, rag papermaking depended on reusing discarded domestic fabrics. Examining this era’s printed materials, she imagines the interlocked fibers of this paper formed from anonymous multitudes of gathered cloth and the unspoken histories they hold. Building on this history and her own environmental concerns, she gathers and transforms discarded bedsheets and t-shirts into sculptural forms. Goodman completely transforms her sustainable materials to create layered, even floating abstract shapes.
About the Artist
Julia Goodman works at the intersection of papermaking, textiles, sculpture, and painting. Her work is included in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, DePaul Art Museum, Recology San Francisco, and Google. Goodman has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and recent exhibitions include the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, Saint Mary’s College, CCA Hubbell Street Gallery, and Berkeley Art Center. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency, Recology SF, Creativity Explored, Salina Art Center, and The Space Program. In 2020 she was selected for the 2020 Women to Watch Award by the San Francisco Advocacy for the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Goodman earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University. In between she studied art at Santa Monica College. In 2015-2016, she was a Full Time Visiting Lecturer, Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College Chicago. Goodman teaches Papermaking: From Fiber to Paper at CCA and leads papermaking workshops throughout the Bay Area including Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Exploratorium, Creative Growth, and NIAD. She lives in the Bay Area with artist Michael Hall and their family.