Overview
Julie Cockburn's embellishment of found paintings and photographs by embroidering, painting and reassembling, delivers the images out of redundancy into a meaningful present. The very stuff of Portraits and Landscapes is, indeed, portraits and landscapes. Hand-tinted studio portraits of the 50s show the persistence of lives recorded in an instant: a mother and daughter, the vignetted emanation of a young girl, soft tones of a movie star, and lush landscapes of mountain and lake provide the raw material. Who are the people in these portraits? Where are these places? Little can be deduced from their mute appearances. A locket necklace shows us little of the sitter's biography. The mountain range gives no clues of which tarn, loch or lake lies at its foot.
