Artist Statement
Julie Rafalski is an artist working with collage, drawing and photography. She examines architectural surroundings and how they are reconfigured through the process of memory. Collage and its techniques of cutting out, displacing and juxtaposing images is key to her work, both as a process and a methodology. She creates images as archives, unstable, fragmented and comprised of multiple spaces.
Her colour pencil drawings depict remembered spaces (architectural interiors or places in nature) and explore the links between memory, imagination and perception. The abstracted architectural structures are made of fragments of different architectural spaces joined together in playful and unexpected ways to form irrational spaces. Multiple spaces and times exist in one drawing. Colour is used to bring the work into the present moment of sensation and perception.
Her series of 100 photographs depicts details of the interior of her grandmother’s house in Poland and focuses on her childhood experience there, documenting a world that has long disappeared and only exists in the unreliable space of memory. She explores memory as process and how it is constantly being rewritten in the act of recollection.
CV
Education
2004-2006 MFA in Fine Art Media, Slade School of Fine Art (University College London)
1999-2003 BFA in Visual Communication, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Solo Exhibitions
2014 Collages, Skwer, Fabryka Trzciny, Warsaw
2014 Projections, Wooden Gallery Studio Space, Chicago
2013 Not in View, Westminster Reference Library Gallery, London
Selected Group Exhibitions
2022 Give or Take, Centre for Recent Drawing, London
2019 Sender: kunstort ELEVEN artspace, Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Germany
2018 Derwent Art Prize Show, Mall Galleries, London; Trowbridge Arts,
Wiltshire & Derwent Pencil Museum, Keswick
2017 Temporär zu Hause, Glashalle City Hall, Tübingen, Germany
2013 Indications, Saint Luke's Centre, London
2012 Salon Art Prize 2012 Show, Matt Roberts, London
2012 WW Solo Award Group Show, WW Gallery, London
2011 The Aesthetics of Art Education, Cubitt Gallery, London
2011 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2010 Vanishing Point, Elevator Gallery, London
2007 Illustrative 07, Villa Elisabeth, Berlin
2006 A Perfect Future, Projection Gallery, Liverpool Biennale
Selected Screenings
2006 Non-Grata International Vilm and Fideo Festival, Pärnu, Estonia
Selected Residencies
2022 Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway
2019 Nelimarkka Museum; Alajärvi, Finland
2017 Kunstort Eleven Artspace; Börstingen, Germany
Collections
National Galleries of Scotland
University College London Library
Chelsea College of Art Library, London
Private Collections in the UK, USA and Poland
Bibliography
2014 Projections, Exhibition Catalogue, text by Jason Foumberg
2014 Collages, Exhibition Catalogue, text by Alex Urso
Biography
Of Polish-American heritage, she obtained a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2003) and an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (2006). She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has shown her work at solo shows at the David and Reva Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago (2016), Fabryka Trzciny in Warsaw (2014) and Westminster Reference Library Gallery in London (2013). Her work was shown at group shows in the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Germany, The Royal Academy Summer Show, (London) and the Liverpool Biennale, The Mall Galleries (London), among others. She has participated in several international residencies.
Since 2010 she has also been working as an freelance arts educator and has worked with institutions such as Cubitt Education, Eastside and Margate Now Festival.
In 2018 she was shortlisted for the Derwent Art Prize. Her work is held in several international public and private collections. She is based in London and Margate, UK.