Julia McKinlay
Undergrowth
Thursday 9 September - Friday 1 October 2021
Julia McKinlay (b.1986) is an artist, curator and researcher based in Leeds.
McKinlay’s practice combines sculpture and print processes to move between two and three-dimensional space. She makes installations and works in series that represent semi-fictional environments for the viewer to experience. Previous works have explored the edge of the world, an aquarium and the back of a snail’s shell. Her work is informed by research visits to museum archives, landscapes, and workshops. Using processes in the studio that mimic events in nature through the involvement of chemical reactions, heat and pressure, McKinlay’s work considers the overlap between the natural and the industrial.
McKinlay graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2009 and The Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD at Leeds Beckett University in collaboration with Yorkshire Sculpture International.
Recent group exhibitions include: Material Matters, Sunny Bank Mills (2021); Leeds Summer Group Show, Online (2020); Kuroko, Index Festival, Leeds (2019); MI: LAB Basic Training Programme, CfSHE Gallery, Tokyo (2018); The Factory, Djúpavík, Iceland (2017); Artists' Village, METAL, Southend-on-Sea (2016); Oh For You! I Would Do Anything, Tritongatan5, Gothenburg (2015).
Her artist book Feeling the Underside was published by Yorkshire Sculpture International and Leeds Beckett University, and launched at the Henry Moore Institute in 2019. She has participated in residencies at MI:LAB, Japan; METAL, Southend-on-Sea; Joya: arte + ecologia, Spain; Listhus, Iceland; Skaftfell, Iceland.
She is the founder and curator of Threshold, an open-air, artist-led space for sculpture in Leeds.
Undergrowth is an exhibition of new sculpture by Julia McKinlay, that draws on research into molluscs, conchology and personal experiences of the Yorkshire landscape. The sculptures have additionally been made to be a stage set for a group of Leeds City College dance students to respond to and devise a new piece of choreography. Documentation of this collaboration will be made available during the exhibition.
The work is informed by walking through ancient woodland in the Peak District and exploring the Jurassic exposures of the north east coast where the fossilised remnants of molluscs emerge from layers of rock. Molluscs have been characters in McKinlay’s work since 2018 when a visit to Leeds Discovery Centre introduced her to the long history of conchology (the study of shells) in Leeds. Or particular interest has been the xenophora carrier snail which is itself a collector and curator of shells. Xenophora gather detritus from the sea floor (shells, corals, stones) and incorporate this material into its shell for self defence and camouflage. Like a xenophora, McKinlay gathers ideas and forms from diverse strands of research and combines them to make installations that represent semi-fictional spaces. In this exhibition, McKinlay has made an obscure undergrowth of mosses, trees and rocks, and is inhabited by an imaginary species of mollusc.
Supported by Leeds City College Arts Fund