JULIE SPEED
Artist Statement
For as long as I can remember I’ve been collecting moldy, sooty, flood and fire damaged books. Also bits of metal, wood, rocks, screws, plumbing supplies, wrenches, etc. When I was a kid I got in trouble for soldering together “borrowed” kitchen implements and clock parts. Collage is a great break from painting and just as the daily practice of drawing gradually builds up the communication between hand and eye, in the same physical way, pitting a small piece of paper text against a hunk of wood or iron in collage is something you can practice and get better at. Arranging different size spheres on various size open planes, then various sized closed planes and so on over and over is almost endlessly absorbing. What I’m looking for – whatever the mathematical relationship is between the spheres is like something I already know but forgot or something lost that I think I know where I left it but then I keep losing it again. It took several weeks and thousands of combinations to arrange the balls of snakes in Axis, Falling Snakes, and Trick Snakes. I would twine them one-way and they would be wrong, then the next and the next and the next…wrong, wrong wrong. Then, suddenly, with an almost audible “click” they would be right and I had to get them down quickly before they slipped out of whack again. By learning the snakes I was also, for the future, learning the tangle of human limbs in the various fighting men drawings and paintings, the curves of the tree limbs in Revelations, the eddies of the water in Adrift and so on.
