Julia Goodman’s current work dives deeper 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. These fabrics hold known and unknown stories. The fibers absorbed the common but unique private human experiences of love, sleep, dreams, sex, birth, illness, care-taking and death that accumulate to shape our collective experience. Removing the finished edges and boundaries of textiles by tearing apart and breaking down individual pieces of fabric into pulp, Goodman engages in a symbolic act of dismantling parts of the individual to meld with others.
My papermaking is a study in how we fall apart, expose our hearts, heal, and come back together. By gathering discarded fabrics, I seek to bring into relief the invisible, essential work of historical and contemporary women through my sculptural pieces. Waning & Waxing, a deeply personal piece about my experience as a grieving daughter and expecting mother twelve years apart, drew from a need to seek catharsis through transformation of physical materials via mimicry of a Jewish mourning ritual. In Jewish tradition, fabric on the chest is ripped at graveside, symbolic of exposing one’s heart in grief. At the conclusion of the mourning period, the rip is sewn and repaired, no longer raw, but leaving a visible scar. By working with handmade paper, I invite contemplation of cycles of love and loss that mark our lives.
Goodman recently developed two new ways of working with handmade paper. In warm dry weather, she works outside manipulating pulped fabrics from domestic sources against exterior surfaces, brick walls, building corners and concrete pads. Drying in the sun, the pulp absorbs and lifts small fragments off of more permanent surfaces. The altered personal fabrics shift hard public surfaces slowly over time and challenge traditional definitions of strength. Inside her studio, she works with different colored pulped fabrics forming complicated compositions and color relationships over a week’s time. Goodman slowly builds up intricate layered pieces that combine hard edges and mixed colors.
With a focus on her ecological footprint and creating texture, Goodman created monochromatic paper sculptures with repurposed materials for years. Newer to her work is a more colorful palette. Each hue is the result of working with the original fabric color or mixing together two or more different colored pulped fabrics without the addition of any pigments or dyes. Combining the different colored fibers creates vibrating fields of color and presents a metaphor for interdependence.
Julia Goodman (b. 1979, Atlanta, GA) earned an MFA from California College of the Arts (2009) and a BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University (2001). She studied art at Santa Monica College (2002-2006). Recent exhibitions include: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL; Salina Art Center, Salina, KS; Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN; and California College of the Arts Hubbell Street Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Her work is included in the collections of National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency, Inverness, CA; Recology SF, San Francisco, CA; Creativity Explored, San Francisco, CA; and Salina Art Center, Salina, KS. Goodman lives and works in Berkeley with artist Michael Hall and their young child.