Julia Holt Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
I am studying an MA Fine Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, Currently I am looking at displacement and emigre, using the narrative of the journey and researching language and culture, celebrating the colours and rituals left behind due to famine or persecution. I work in oils on board and ink, pastel and pen on paper, but am often experimental with materials and media.
I am in my first year studying an MA in Fine Art part time . My area of interest is to look at the cultures and traditions of those people who had to uproot and leave their old lives behind them due to famine or persecution. I am focusing on people from Yemen and Ethiopia looking at traditional dress and rituals and am also very interested in the different dialects and the shapes and meanings of letters.
I have studied the Hebrew letters for approximately five years, gathering information about their meaning and have made solar etchings using their significant shapes. This is an ongoing project that I often return to using a reference book that has taken me five years to produce (still unfinished). Tradition has always played an important role within my work and I have run workshops on this theme at the JW3 Centre in Finchley, London as well as producing work on the themes of candle lighting and sacred cups for sabbath services.
I am very enthusiastic to undertake a project that looks at Judaism on a worldwide scale. The starting point for this project is the journey made by people of many different cultures. Looking initially at their decision to leave their place of birth and of their ancestors’ birth and travel by foot, to what they hope will be safety from persecution or famine. I am looking at the colours of different cultures ie clothes and food, and the colour of the terrain they travelled across and also using text in the form of poetry as a mantra, to convey a simple notion of what they may be enduring or have endured.
I am interested in exploring three particular cultures as I have a connection to all three. Arabic, Hebrew and Ethiopian. These three rich cultures are all very different from the western way of life and use Semitic alphabets written from right to left. The letters, I feel, hold many secrets and their shapes are something of a mystery that marries well with the atmosphere that I wish to evoke within my paintings.
The colour of the earth, sand and stone, mixed with the colour of the fabrics and dyes, tie in with my interest in Sustainability, as it is often traditional practices that are the most ecologically sound and therefore the most in tune with nature and the natural world.
I have been studying the shape and forms of the Hebrew alphabet for approximately four years and have compiled a sketch book of my research as well as producing solar etchings of the beautiful shapes of the Hebrew letters. I have also produced paintings on traditional themes, such as praying and candle lighting, ceremonial wine cups and used text within painting.
I want to celebrate the cultures that have been lost to a people. The Speilberg archives show costume and everyday dress, dancing and singing, traditions that these people carried with them until they died. The generations that have followed have become westernised as a necessity and I feel strongly that there was so much joy and positivity in what was lost. In the past, living from the land with nature, has been looked down upon, but now, with our natural world in decline, we can all begin to see the wisdom in ethnic, communal living. There is so much mental illness within, in what it may be argued is an overly sophisticated world and it is not just the people from these cultures that have suffered loss, indeed, it is all of us.
