Sydney-based artist Julia Gutman (b. 1993) uses fabric to tell stories. After earning her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, she thought she would teach full-time, but the artist’s former studio-mate died unexpectedly, and Gutman returned to Australia to cope with the loss. A chance encounter with a sewing machine before the pandemic led her to pivot, and today she works exclusively with donated materials—sheets and towels, clothing, and tablecloths—sketching constantly, and then scaling her drawings onto a large sheet, only then cutting the material, going over each work instinctually with her sewing machine, crafting scenes from nothing but thread and textile. Her process is fluid, often founded in friends’ posing, blending conceptually loaded materials with more functional selections. The artist works experimentally, repositioning her textiles dozens of times in some cases; there’s infinite room to explore through her embroidery, to shift the subjects in her narrative compositions. Gutman’s approach is just as important as the final product: a culmination of her thoughts and emotions. 

Some of her work’s riff on historical paintings—generally those of women painted by men (for instance, Balthus’s The White Skirt (1937), which depicts the artist’s then-wife Antoinette de Watteville, who was just 12 years old when the couple met. Gutman’s version is called The Black Jeans (2021), and it’s something of a parody of the original’s demure posing). Here she may still ask friends to pose, but the approach is one of mimicry; Gutman will begin with a fixed composition and then make adjustments, investigating how one might project the self onto the other. She’s read academic literature about the Wurzburg Witch Trials from the 1600s; more recently, Gutman researched the concept of historical exclusion in a book called Feeling Jewish by Devorah Baum, and she cites Mary Gaitskill, Ross Gay, and Zadie Smith as additional points of reference. “The self is unknowable,” she notes. Yet Gutman finds that dissonance compelling.