Julie Keating - 'The Unexpected' (online exhibition)

Click here for artwork by Julie Keating

Still life stripped back, objects that vibrate between truth and fiction with carefully crafted mis-en-scene theatrical staging. Julie Keating’s work – singular or collectively - create a sense of stillness, quietness, a timeless nostalgia that connects to the viewer through an association, a past memory or current state of being. Her narrative and the making of the inanimate animate reflect a sense of self back to the viewer.

Keating’s ability to tell a story or present an empty book upon which the viewer writes his/her own chapters is created through these pictorial representations. Her work reflects a truth-telling embedded in a photographic process. The painting’s truth is enforced through the reference to the realism within a photograph. To paint from life, to paint from photographs, to collage and manipulate is a re-representation. Keating finds real objects have significance in their narrative and restages them to tell a new story – she leverages the truth via photorealism. Leveraging of truth to tell more truths creates validity.

Keith Lawrence, September 2021