A Fine Line Julia Gutman

Words

Suspended from ceilings, hung high on walls or digitally animated, a cast of characters – alone or together, formed of thread, cloth and paint –intertwine, separate and regroup; dream, tumble and embrace; leap high, curl up in a chair; gaze into a mirror. Created from re-purposed fabric donated to the artist by her family and friends, Julia Gutman’s patchwork world is rich in both texture and gesture.

A FINE LINE, THE TITLE OF GUTMAN’S new exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, is both a literal and metaphorical description of the artist’s approach. She often creates expanded self-portraits, appearing in various — and sometimes multiple iterations of herself, isolated or with people she’s close to. While she literally creates her images from the fine lines of fabric and stitch, she also mines the delicate boundaries between the self and the other; between intimacy and violence, attachment and loneliness.

The artist explains she’s been thinking about lots of different kinds of psychological dualities and using a double self-portrait to play with ideas around the way we attempt to see ourselves, the way that we see others; the ways that we’re kind of always in an active projection. (1)

She elaborates: ‘I guess there’s a nice duality that’s embedded in all of my work, which is made of collected material — so all the figures are made of everyone else. It’s an unstable collective portrait.’ Recently, she’s also been weaving pieces of linen, which she then stretches and paints, ‘so the weave is embedded in the image’. It’s an approach which is also replete in metaphorical potential: our lives are inextricably interwoven with those of other humans.

A Fine Line will also include a large diptych, I’ll be your mirror (for Azazel) (2025), which is created from collaged textiles, embroidery and acrylic paint on linen. It’s a double self-portrait of the artist, naked, her expression sombre, standing back-to-back with herself on brown earth. Linking hands across the divide between two canvases beneath a soft, cloudy sky, in this barren landscape, the artist is circled by what could be a rough line of energy.

1. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotes from a conversation between Julia Gutman and Jennifer Higgie, 5 June 2025.

2. https://www.sullivanstrumpf. com/exhibitions/ lighting-of-the-sails-echo

Look closely, and the mix of dense stitching, loose threads and sensual swathes of paint evoke both an intense introspection and a visceral sense of flesh and earth.

Despite her facility with the medium, Gutman’s turn to textiles and fabric was relatively recent. As she was growing up, she and her sister were ‘always cutting up jeans and putting safety pins in them and bleaching stuff’, but after studying painting in Sydney, she completed an MA in sculpture at the Rhodes Island School of Design. She was drawn to using textiles ‘as a way of being able to make big objects with the kind of confidence I lacked in the wood shop and the metal shop’. In 2019, she decided to buy a sewing machine. The first thing she made was a quilt for a friend’s new baby and it encouraged her to keep going. ‘Thinking like a painter but using a sewing machine’, the more skilled she became, the harder it was to make what she describes as ‘happy accidents’. At first, she approached using textiles a — given the relationship between sewing, quilting and domesticity — a feminist gesture. Inspired by artists she’s long admired, such as Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, both of whom employed sewing in their practice to wild, expressive effect, she said: ‘Once you become deeply engaged with a medium, it becomes about the making and the materials and it stops feeling like a political choice and starts becoming an obsession’.    In 2024 — the year after she won the Archibald Prize, with her portrait of the singer-songwriter Montaigne — Gutman expanded upon the possibilities of her medium with a seven-minute animation, which transformed the sails of the Sydney Opera House into a mesmerising portal to another world. A loose interpretation of the myth of Narcissus transported to the Australian landscape, Echo is a story of confronting your shadow: a tale told via a digital rendering of an age-old craft. The artist — in jeans and a striped t-shirt, her hair made from her mother’s scarf, her face created from a hessian sack — gazes into the waves and, on seeing her reflection, falls into the water. She then journeys through various landscapes both oceanic and earthbound, all of which were, again, created from donated fabrics, including denim and silk. Eventually, Echo comes across another version of herself. Initially aggressive, dancing, they are united. Gutman describes it as the most collaborative work she’s ever made; a close friend, Angus Mills, composed the jazzy, dreamy score, and another directed the dance. Gutman described the animation as bringing together her ‘interests in narrative, materiality and the psychological in a story that I hope can be simultaneously personal and universal.’ (2)

Whether in fabric or film, Gutman’s portraits of the everyday are tempered with something magical: a search for meaning via the intimate, and infinite, possibilities of human interaction. When I spoke to her in mid-June she was deeply immersed in creating works for her new show. She sent me photographs of her studio, the floor scattered with scraps of fabric, some woven into loose grids. On the walls she had sketched out various scenarios: a couple embracing as they float through an expanse; two young women, one reclining, the other stroking her hair; the intimation of someone crouched, their hands before them. A stretched weave enlivened with delicate stains of blue paint; a body collaged onto a canvas, fragile beneath faint stars. New images — new worlds — emerging, in the midst of being conjured.

Julia Gutman: A Fine Line Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney