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Julia Gutman, life in the third person
Julia Gutman life in the third person 2024 (detail). Woven textile, 12.62 metres (H) x 3.3 metres (L) (installed). Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf. © Julia Gutman, 2024. Photo: Rift Photography.
Julia Gutman, life in the third person
life in the third person is not a self-portrait. It is masquerading as one.
Julia Gutman’s face and body appear everywhere in the textile work, populating its woven tableaux. Here, two figures sit in a state of intimacy and dislocation—facing opposite directions, while simultaneously resting against one another. They are together and yet apart. Just beyond them, a group throws a limp form of another figure into the air. And further on, to the right, a pair of figures are entangled in a violent scene, with the blade of a sword pressing down on an overpowered body, which lies below. Gutman’s image is in every one of the scenes, yet because of this repetition the individual person also ceases to really be in any of them. The monumental textile is not a retreat into narcissism, but a push to understand the limits of our own image.
The repeated image of the artist is, in a way, a proxy for all of us. It stands in for our urge to be understood, the impossibility of encapsulating the complexities of our own experience, and the inadequacy of our public projections. Most challengingly, the multiplied selves of Gutman’s work suggest the inevitable warping of our image that occurs as it moves through the world, becomes unmoored from us, and is moulded by the hands of others. “Someone writes a memoir at 22 and then they’re 50 and they still have to speak to whatever they were,” Gutman explains. “The irony is that the more that you try to explain who you are to people the more likely you are to flatten yourself and lose your capacity to change or be complicated.”
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About Julia Gutman
Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is anchored by an experimental textile process, with which she interrogates her own relationships and the performance of selfhood. Her figurative works are made primarily from donated fabric – worn clothes, slept-in sheets – and often replicate compositional moments from historical artworks, using her friends as models to respond to and reinvent the originals. Garments often become physical artifacts of the past – stand-ins for those we have lost, or relics of who we once were. In this sense, Gutman works with the textures of memory, using found textiles as a vehicle for connection and collaboration.
While Gutman’s process is labour intensive, it is not precious; edges are rough, seams are wonky and images are frayed all over. Her mode of sewing is at once tender and aggressive. She brings together disparate things in an act of ‘mending’, but violently punctures and rips the materials to do so. Not a seamstress in the traditional sense, her process is much like painting. The stories of the materials intertwine with the imagery to create a layered narrative. life in the third person marks Gutman’s debut solo institutional exhibition, presented by The Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2024, Gutman was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House and Vivid LIVE for the iconic Lighting of the Sails, creating her first video work, Echo.
In 2023, aged 29, Gutman was awarded the Archibald Prize, making her the youngest winner in 85 years. She was one of six exhibiting artists in Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. She was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace Sydney. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally in Rome, Milan and New York.
