Julie Annis, 'Curtain'

The landscape of Sussex downland is at the core of Annis’ work and it’s a subject that has long fascinated her, being a place of childhood memories and local day trips as well as the backdrop to the landscape of her current home. The gentle hills provide a linear structure to her paintings as well as the plough lines, tracks and field boundaries and the strata and layers of chalk. Below one’s feet, one thinks of the countless barrows encased in burial mounds dotted along the Downs and the fossils and treasures sandwiched between the unseen layers of chalk and flint. Also considered are the people who have lived on and worked the hills and the ancient ways carved through the chalk leaving behind their white impressions. 

As part of her practice, Annis incorporates domestic linen into the painting surface, which is sewn together to create the desired composition. It’s important for her that there is a human presence within the work and a domestic framing of the landscape speaking of the longing of the natural world through an interior window. The linen sourced is worn down and smooth, eroded by skin and time, sometimes aged with stains, snags and tears or fades from sun and multiple washes. These sewn elements are a way of adding a layer of history and time, memory and loss, human touch, and ‘motherly’ process. The reference to crafted objects of reverence and ritual are also important to Annis, thus actualising the desire to create paintings with a shrine-like response to the transcendent experience of being in the landscape touched with grief and humanity, stillness, and escape. 

Julie Annis completed her BA in fine art, painting and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art in 2002. After graduation, Annis exhibited in Scotland and then went on to work as a graphic designer and illustrator as well as raise three children. She re-established her practice of making art during the summer of 2020 and from then has continued to paint whilst looking after her young family. In September 2023, she was accepted onto the inaugural Turps Hastings painting program, led by artist Matthew Burrows. 

Annis has recently been selected by Fen Ditton gallery to be part of the Young Collectors ‘works on paper’ exhibition. In November 2023 she exhibited at gallery 19a in Brighton with the three-woman group exhibition ‘The mud at our feet’. In 2022 she was long listed for the Jackson painting prize, and exhibited at Glyndebourne’s ‘Fair Ground’ exhibition in 2022 and 2023-24 curated by Nerissa Taysom as well as exhibiting in various other group shows in London, Kent and Sussex.