Bespoke – tailor made to fit the unfit, the cast offs and awkward square pegs splitting the seams of meaning. These textile hybrids emerge from experience, from feeling my way across life’s material spectrum.
Julia Couzens

Working intuitively rather than executing preconceived ideas, Couzens’s singular approach to her studio practice begins in picking through practical things around her, the mundane heap of life. Taking these things as they are, alert to what comes alive in her hand and triggers her senses, Couzens fashions abstract works both improvisational and acutely considered.

Fabric remnants, paper, wood scrap, thread, bits of hardware and discarded notions from consumer culture accumulate energy and presence as she stitches, bundles, cuts, recuts, patches, layers and folds – sorting possibilities while watching for a move. Tulle is foundational to Couzens’s constructions. She uses it like paint, its transparency and nuanced palette trigger the senses, sending shivers that deliberately undermine Date Night notions of femininity. It’s a fragile medium, but heaviness and density can be felt; identities dissolve into pure form, color fields float and flow, calling
our sensibilities to dance.

For Couzens, questions have a longer life than answers and she intentionally leaves work on pause, the eye, mind, and senses continuously circulating. When she sticks the landing, in irritated fits of resistance to her considerable stockpile of formal conclusions, she pivots, renegotiating the heightened space of charged ambiguity. In these fraught days of divisiveness, such beckoning states offer psychic space on reverie’s higher ground.