Julie Struck

Leading rain barrel painting at Sustainable Berea's Urban Farm in September 2016
Artist Statement: 

The mixed media and digital artwork I produce reflect and illustrate my interest in dissolving boundaries and celebrating connections between art, writing, science and other typically unassociated disciplines. Primary themes include family, history, truth, memorialization, as well as the work of women, and what women have experienced in our culture both past and present.

My artistic process involves taking disparate or fragmentary elements and rearranging, layering and piecing them together into a new cohesive whole using both traditional and electronic approaches. Through repeated obscuring and revealing, I create complex and constantly shifting visuals that often refer to subliminal mixed messaging and other manipulative techniques used by mass media to barrage viewers with what they should be, do and think. There is also a strong narrative quality to my artwork, expressive of my impressions of American culture and at times my family of origin. But while I am memorializing and documenting my own story, which is intensely personal, I am also engaging in processes similar to scrap-booking, journaling, photographic and/or digitally recording and archiving — activities that are universally used by non-artists to document and give meaning and substance to their lives.