Julia Fennell

There’s a superstition in the knitting and crochet community called the sweater curse. It’s the idea that if you make a sweater for a significant other, you’re doomed to break up before you finish it. I used to not believe in the sweater curse, but that was before I tried to save a failing friendship with an ultramarine blue sweater. I knew it was over before I even finished the ribbing for the first sleeve.

Even now though, I think the sweater curse is just as much a promise as a curse. I believe art is just another way of inviting a relationship into your mind and appreciating it for all it is. After all, to be loved is to be known, to be understood, and I love nothing more than to understand someone through a painting or a quilt. Having hours at a time to just sit in the mental space of a relationship and relish the love you feel is the greatest gift that art can give.

My work also deals with relationships to the self via self-portraiture. I believe that the work of sitting in relationship with myself is one of the most important ways to understand who I am and who I have been. By opening up the space of my art to all versions of myself across time, I hold space for who I am and who I have been. Relating to the past versions of myself offers up a space to process my experiences. This practice of radical self-acceptance through art that builds nonjudgemental relationships with my past selves allows me to be kinder and gentler in my relationship with myself.

The media I use to build these relationships bolsters the love, connection, and care of the work I am doing through my art. Much of my work consists of oil paintings. The process of oil painting is slow and meditative. The time I devote to each painting is time to reflect, connect, love, and grow. The other medium I primarily use is quilting. The choice of a quilt not only provides connotations of comfort that bolster the intended meaning of the piece, but it also evokes and subverts ideas around homemaking. My initial encounters with the medium of quilting were in my childhood, when my grandmother taught me as an exercise in homemaking. Now, as an adult, reimagining that idea of homemaking without rejecting it is at the core of my work. I do not feel the need to reject the idea of making a home, and I love that I can adapt my homemaking skills to build my own chosen home.

My work is a constant pursuit of love through knowledge and connection through understanding. To me, the relational work of making art is an act of unparalleled love, and that’s what my work is chasing. My work invites the viewer to share in the relational space that I open up through painting, quilting, and other media. 

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