Dreich by Julie-Ann Simpson

Julie-Ann (b. 1992, Aberdeen, Scotland) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Since graduating from Gray’s School of Art in 2014, she returned to the painting department in a teaching role and also worked at Grampian Hospitals Art Trust before relocating to Glasgow. She is a previous recipient of the Visual Arts and Craft Makers Awards, Hope Scott Trust Award and RSA Guthrie Award and Medal for painting both in 2014 and 2019. During lockdown she developed Marram Arts, an online curatorial platform for connecting artists from Scotland and further afield. She is an elected professional member of Visual Arts Scotland and currently sits on their Council.

As a painter, Julie-Ann Simpson is interested in the porous boundaries between interior and exterior spaces, dreams and reality. The paintings sit in that transitional place, often beginning as representations, but eventually seem to slip into ambiguous afterimages. Simpson’s latest body of work, developed from a two-month residency in Yamanashi, Japan, considers our interrelationship with the natural world bringing together ideas of imagination, ritual, memory, pleasure and language.