Artist Julia Gutman sees in multiple dimensions

The Archibald Prize winner and artist takes The Everywoman into her studio. 

An artist’s studio has a unique allure. It’s a site of industry and intimacy: to step inside is probably the closest thing to entering another mind. Julia Gutman, the Archibald-winning Australian artist, shows me hers via video call, panning her phone across the room. It’s full of the expected creative detritus: sketches, canvases, books. But there are idiosyncratic touches, too. Gutman, who uses textiles where other painters might use acrylic or watercolour, swivels the camera to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying hundreds of colour-coded fabrics.

And just when I think I’ve got the measure of her (exacting, meticulous, an art history nerd) Gutman tilts the camera down towards her desk. There’s a human face on it with pallid, distorted features and roughly textured flesh, as if it’s been scarred. Gently, Gutman picks it up and the face wilts around her hand. I realise it, too, is made of fabric. As she brings the mask right up to the screen, I can make out each delicate stitch.

If a studio is a physical manifestation of an artist’s mind, then Gutman’s (in Sydney’s Artspace in Woolloomooloo) is thrumming with contradictions. “When you’re a person who makes things,” she says, “all of your emotions and stakes are in the studio and there are moments that feel calm, and there are moments that feel incredibly violent.” She gestures over her shoulder to two larger-than-life figures, standing back-to-back with their hands touching. Their faces are resolved in textiles but their giant bodies are still at the drawing phase. “I’ll come into the studio one day and their heads will be decapitated.”

Like her studio, Gutman’s work contains multitudes. Her most widely-recognised piece is the 2023 Archibald prizewinning portrait of Jess Cerro, the singer known by their stage name, Montaigne. Montaigne is both Gutman’s personal friend and a public figure. The portrait, which captures the celebrity in a moment of private reflection, engages with that duality. Gutman also challenged portraiture conventions (using textiles instead of paint), while paying a respectful nod to the Western canon (the composition, with the figure crouching at the bottom of the canvas, was inspired by Seated Woman with Bent Knees, Egon Schiele’s 1917 portrait of his wife.)

Gutman’s win was ground-breaking. At 29, she was one of the youngest winners ever, as well as the eleventh woman in the prize’s 102-year history—facts that I am almost wary of reciting here, at the risk of defining Gutman by her age and her gender, rather than by her art.  

I ask her whether, by painting with a sewing machine instead of a brush, she is making a feminist statement. After all, textiles, like so many traditionally feminine modes of expression, have traditionally been relegated to “craft”—the medium of homemakers, not serious artists.

As always with Gutman, the answer is complicated. Yes, art’s arbitrary gender conventions did initially drive her to the sewing machine. She was studying an MFA at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, focusing on sculpture, when she found herself alienated from the hyper-masculine space of the workshop. She confesses (with typical self-deprecation) that this was partly because she didn’t have technical confidence with metal or woodwork. But choosing to work with textiles, she says, was also “a material ‘fuck you’ to a space that was almost averse to anything pretty.”

While this initial choice might have been a response to gender conventions, it is by no means her artistic statement. “Textiles are the medium through which I move through a number of ideas.” She sighs, palpably frustrated. “It’s almost sexism to have to talk about textiles all the time.”

And Gutman is an artist with so much to say, it would be a waste indeed to talk only of textiles. She tells me that her art is informed by what she reads — usually fiction and essays — and that her interest in figurative painting is primarily with narrative. “I’m always trying to build some kind of world.” 

In the span of our short conversation, she quotes Greek mythology, artist Paul Chan, and writer Devorah Baum, to name a few. But even her most esoteric references are never pretentious. She offers them with the same inclusive enthusiasm that she might reach for a well-worn piece of fabric from her “library”. (A lovely word for those floor-to-ceiling shelves. Each swatch, after all, has a story to tell.) 

Gutman is grateful for the Archibald win, which she said, has made her work easier on a practical level, but she credits the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship exhibition at Woolloomooloo's Artspace as the biggest inflection point in her career. She had just returned from the US, having completed her masters, and was grieving the death of a close friend. That show, in which she debuted her now-signature textile figurations, was an exploration of friendship and intimacy. Commercially, it changed her trajectory: Gutman received representation at a gallery and was commissioned to work overseas. And artistically, it was transformative. She had that elusive epiphany, which marks the coming-of-age of any (good) artist.

“I stopped trying to make “art” and realised people just want something that’s real.” 

Having found her voice at Artspace, Gutman continues to stretch the bounds of her chosen medium, trying, always, to say something real. She recently opened her second solo exhibition, at Sullivan+Strumf in Melbourne. Taking its title from James Baldwin, Everyone You Are Looking at is Also You, is about the inescapability of our own consciousness, or, as Gutman eloquently puts it, the simple existential truth that “you’ll never know another mind”.

I point out that her earlier work at Artspace used textiles to explore the idea that there is no such thing as a sovereign self. By creating portraits of her friends out of donated fabric, Gutman conveyed that we are, each of us, stitched together from a web of complicated personal relationships. With this solo show, about how there is nothing but the self, and how other people are merely projections of our own mind, does Gutman not contradict herself?

She lights up at the suggestion. “There’s a tension,” she says excitedly, “it’s almost an argument with that first show.”

And so Gutman continues, threading psychodramas across canvases and between exhibitions, weaving an ever-complicating pattern. For her next major project later this year, she’s been invited to a textile lab in the Netherlands to work at a loom that, at six by three metres, is one of the largest in the world. And for this year’s Vivid Festival in Sydney, she’s “doing the Opera House.” When I point out that that’s an absurd thing to be able to say out loud, she laughs, then says, with prayer-like sincerity, that she is “so grateful” to do this as a job.

There’s also that haunting human face on her desk. Gutman explains that it, too, is part of a project for Vivid. She’s been invited to collaborate on a narrative animated film, in which a dancer wears one of her works as a mask. 

When Gutman and I speak on the phone, she has only just wrapped filming. Recalling the spectacle of a professional dancer performing in her mask, Gutman is uncharacteristically lost for words. “I normally can’t see what I’ve done because I’m too close to it. I’ll look at my work and I won’t see a person because I’ll be worrying about whether I’ve articulated a particular shadow correctly. But there was something about it being collaborative…” She trails off, too modest to continue.

I’ll say it for her: she saw something real. Encountering Gutman’s work is intimate and arresting, like having a genuine, honest interaction with another human being. In a world where commercial art is often flattened to social media grids, Gutman’s violent, delicate, sinewy figures are a gift: work that must be wrestled with, not scrolled past.