ARTIST STATEMENT
My work seeks connection with the viewer or participant. If something I create is not seenby another person, it feels like it is lost, like something that fell out of my pocket. I don’tneed to be there when it is viewed, but the viewer is part of my process and intention.
At seven years old I placed my first note in a bottle in Puget Sound, WA. I remember feeling compelled by the idea that someone could find my note and read it. A year later a letter arrived from a family in British Columbia who discovered my bottle next to their boat in a marina. That cemented my desire to make things and leave them around for others to discover. I anonymously placed a variety of small painted stones, cookie fortunes and small wooden sculptures in our neighbor’s yards.
When I entered art school, I gained an historical perspective about conceptual art. I was particularly taken with Jean Dubuffet and Marcel Duchamp who made sculptures that were childlike, non-traditional and fresh. They helped give me permission to further develop my own ideas and to ensure that materials had an intentional connection to the object I was making. I also learned to draw there. I have always been drawn to found objects, lost treasures and discarded items. I collected a tiny red car that was smashed by a truck, adopted a scarf lost by a small child, and multiple branches that were ripped from the trees by violent storms. I identified with these throw-aways, and wanted to re-form them into art that everyone would recognize as valuable again.
Found objects became the heart of my work in 1986 when I returned to my original love of placing letters in bottles, leaving them for stranger to find. I scattered 110 bottles across Southeast Asia over the next year.
In my current project, Variants, I have combined scraps, garbage, lint, broken glass and bobby pins, among hundreds of other materials, to create new pieces, resulting in a vast collection of Coronavirus variants, each as unique and different as people are. Everything is made of combined elements of matter, both art and people.
The aim of all of my work is to create a meeting between the objects and the people.
Julie Lindell curriculum vitae
Contact Julie: juliealindell@gmail.com