Julie Cockburn @ Flowers Gallery

Centred around the appropriation and alteration of found images, Julie Cockburn’s work appears familiar and often nostalgic. Her source materials, such as 1940s and 50s studio portrait photographs of unknown sitters, are given new significance through the skilful manipulation of their surfaces.  By reassembling, stitching into and over-painting the original photographs with geometric patterns and imaginative gestural doodles, her process can be described as entering a ‘conversation’ with the history of the image, each act of embellishment or reconfiguration an attempt to “excavate them, physically and emotionally”.
The title of the present exhibition derives from the proverb ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’,