Julie Cockburn trained as a sculptor in the 1990s at Chelsea Collage of Art and Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in London. Today she is known broadly as a collage artist/photographer, whose practice involves the hand-alteration of found paintings, book illustrations and vintage photographs to create constructed, psychologically charged artworks by using traditional craft techniques such as cut and paste and hand embroidery.
Sourcing the found images at car boot sales and through the internet, she methodically embellishes them by adding bright blocks of coloured thread or by cutting shapes from, or into, the surface. These interventions negate the "archetypal ordinariness" of the original image and project new histories onto forgotten keepsakes of the past.
The three Risograph prints in the Twenty@Twenty exhibition are as much about process as they are the final image. Inspired by a newfound love of hand-thrown ceramics, Cockburn sourced analogue photos of Chinese pottery and mid-century portraits and digitally collaged them in Photoshop, before printing them on a vintage Risograph machine. Cockburn has hand embroidered each individual print in a variable edition, producing a hybrid of the unique and mass-produced.