Julie Wills

About the Artist

Julie Wills is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and installation, drawing, text, and intersections between these media. She is recipient of an Individual Artist Award (2019) and a Creativity Grant (2023) from the Maryland State Arts Council. Other recent awards include the SSG and AC Edwards Fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2023), and artist residencies at Marble House Project, Cill Rialaig (Ireland), Arteles (Finland), Jentel, PLAYA, The Hambidge Center, and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center as a Denbo Fellow. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Plain Sight, Washington, DC (in partnership with the Embassy of Sweden and the European Union National Institutes for Culture); Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania; Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA; VisArts, Rockville, MD; C for Courtside, Knoxville, TN; and the Museum of Contemporary Arts Arlington, Arlington, VA. In addition to her individual studio practice, Wills is one of four artist members of The Bridge Club, an interdisciplinary performance art collaborative active since 2004. Wills is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. She lives and works in Baltimore.

Artist's Statement

While my creative practice uses elements from sculpture and installation, drawing and collage, printmaking, and intersections between these media, I think of all of my works as drawings. I plan my works— whether on paper or three-dimensional— as line, mass, and color in space, and I am as interested in the gulfs and voids between materials as I am in the marks themselves.  I choose materials for their metaphoric or associative meanings; sandpaper, for example, contains a tactile recognition of its erosive function while thermostat wire suggests the activation or transmission of heat. Much of my recent work incorporates a longstanding interest in text, signification, legibility, and poetic language.