Drawing on her understanding of the nuanced complexity in the layered emotional mind and complexity of interpersonal relationship, Julia Meyerowitz-Katz expertly creates visual palimpsests with every mark, shape, and gesture she brings into being. Meyerowitz-Katz’s method aims to invite the viewer to feel themselves sensorially into the layered complexity of the layering and superimposition of marks and forms. Dashes and mixtures of oil sticks, paints, graphite dust and more are added until energy has been thoroughly expressed to and from the surface. Marks on the surface are dynamic: they hover, push forward, retreat away; they might suggest form and then immediately deny that, emphasizing instead their integrity and sensuality. When viewing the work, there is a tension between allowing uncertainty and amplification and needing to attribute definite meaning. The viewer is invited to feel themselves into the drawing or the painting’s journey and to allow the resultant image to facilitate a corresponding inner journey. Every work is a telling of impulse, emotion, and personal or collective experience, which Meyerowitz-Katz especially connects to because of her encounters with the hidden complexity of human experience in her mental health work.

“I am working at depth with people, who like me, have their own stories, their own intergenerational inheritances and who are being affected by massive global uncertainties and challenges,” she says. “All my work in one way or another, is an expression of my embodied unconscious responses to the vagaries of uncertainty, trauma, and loss as well as the capacity for connection and joy which we all share.” 

Meyerowitz-Katz lives, creates and practices in Sydney, Australia. She is a certified Jungian analyst, has a Master’s and Postgraduate Diploma in Art Therapy and a BA in Fine Arts with Honors. She is particularly drawn to the invitation in the work of de Kooning and Joan Mitchell to feel into the dynamic tension between depth and surface via color, line, shape, and  movement.