Julie | Waitākere
“I think I would spend more time with my family. That’s, yeah that’s what I’d do differently.
I am so busy. I work really hard, teaching. I give a lot to the students I teach. I give a lot to myself in terms of my own art practice, and I feel like I really should give a little bit more to my family who I love dearly. I’ve got two gorgeous boys and a darling husband, and they’re probably the ones that don’t get as much of me as I should give them. So, I would want to spend more time with them, and not necessarily doing anything in particular, just hanging out and being a family. We have a really awesome home life. It’s just, there’s just not much of it. I think it’s one that we sort of got to that stage in, society where we’re all so busy working and trying to earn money to pay for everything, that we’ve forgotten what’s really important, which is just to be at home and be a family, and I feel like that’s what I want to do more of.
I grew up in a tiny little fishing village in Newlyn in Cornwall. My father was a fisherman. My brother’s a fisherman. I am Cornish through and through. Had an amazing childhood. I suppose what I value most in life is the opportunities that I’ve been given, and the opportunity to spend time doing what I love, which is my art. So, my background is in jewellery. I studied jewellery at university in England, moved over here, got involved in the community art centre hoping to find like-minded people.
So that was 18 years ago, and since then I’ve sort of progressed my way through teaching various different parts of the community, children, adults, adults with special needs. I now teach vulnerable youth, which is very challenging, but very rewarding as well. My own art practice is a mixture of painting, printmaking, jewellery, but more importantly now, sculpture which is something I’ve always wanted to do, and I’m sort of in the early stages of doing. Just set myself this huge challenge of a big steel sculpture which is incredibly scary, because I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I think that’s sort of where I really want to head towards now, is sculpture – big sculpture.”
