UCSD Open Studios: Julia Westerbeke

Julia Westerbeke

"Gary Paul Nabhan writes about taking his children to the Grand Canyon, where he realized 'how much time adults spend scanning the landscape for picturesque panoramas and scenic overlooks. While the kids were on their hands and knees, engaged with what was immediately before them, we adults traveled by abstraction.' He adds that whenever they approached a promontory, his son and daughter would 'abruptly release their hands from mine, to scour the ground for bones, pine cones, sparkly sandstone, feathers, or wildflowers."

-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

My work takes a page from the wondrous and quirky fascinations of childhood, generating worlds concerned with beauty, exploration and play. In drawings and drawing-based installations, I create new terrains that are by turns organic and curiously alien, quiet yet chock-a-block with information. Crystalline, decorative forms are in constant growth and constant accretion. It is an environment always thickening in a delicate flurry of fantastical life. The goal is intimacy, establishing a connection with the viewer through the mesmeric draw of detail and the strange twists of an eccentric, generative terrain.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (London: Penguin Books, 2006) 39.

Julia Westerbeke

Artists