Childhood Memories – An exhibition by Julie Edwardson

During Lockdown, for Julie, the unusual circumstances and the experience of being cut off from the outside world with her mother ill in hospital seemed to conjure powerful emotions of growing up in the 60s and 70s.

 The idiosyncrasies of the family unit are portrayed in a series of oil paintings and mono prints. 

 Attitudes towards The Child at school and treasured childhood possessions all come together in this eclectic mix of images that may spark something in the viewers’ memory.

 Julie uses found materials to evoke memory such as vintage fabrics combined with methods and media such as collage, surface texture, and crayon-like oil bars.

 Julie builds layers into the paint similar to the layering of memory.

 Depictions of familiar objects may be rendered uneasily by the suggestion of brokenness or murky backgrounds.

 Julie says “The things we remember are the things that form us, however don’t forget the things we choose to focus on, those things that seemed once important to us, may be false”.