ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE (MENTOR)
SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2026
Julie Harrison
Visual Artist
Based in New York City
ARTIST STATEMENT
Julie Harrison is a visual artist who probes science and technology to explore the dualities of nature and artifice. Her experimental process-driven work has garnered numerous awards, and she has exhibited widely. Three books by Harrison were published by Granary Books and one with The New Press, and her work has been placed in special collections at The Getty, Library of Congress, Harvard University, Princeton, Columbia University, Yale University, Brown University, and others. For eighteen years, Harrison was a professor of art at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ, where she founded the Art & Technology B.A. program.
I have spent a lifetime investigating materials and media to mine their visual components, always questioning how we can perceive and alter expectations. My work is fueled by experimentation in the pursuit of abstracting the fundamental elements of the medium: light, shape, texture, repetition, movement and color.
My most recent project is inspired by coastlines. I fell in love with lines of the coast in 2024 when I spent two months living on a fjord at an artist residency in Norway, and since then I've created several abstract coastal drawings based on waterways, incorporating lines, shapes and texture into found and rephotographed digital images of microscopic entities. My ethereal-like drawings contain only the essence of life-forms and, in the final result, we see only hints of the recognizable. My coastlines have included Iceland; the fjords of Norway; Long Island Sound in New York; the South Shore of Long Island; the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and most recently the coastline of Lower Manhattan after the floods of Hurricane Sandy.
With graphite on paper, I crop, combine, paint, paste and draw onto harvested images of maps, combined with reproductions of cells, bacterial particles, organs, brain activity and my own chance-mutated shapes from cutouts. My methods of creating are improvisational and process oriented. I work intuitively and draw inspiration from time and place to explore the duality of nature, artifice, and imagination. My abstract, multi-layered drawings play with the idea that life-forms intersect and merge to form relationships with one another, blurring the boundaries between science, fiction, and abstraction. It's as if the biological phenomena of my brain are transported through my body and hands onto paper to be immersed in the wake of life.
I like to work in different countries to discover the world anew - every ecosystem is unique. I collect visual data as field notes, including photographs, objects and drawings, to enhance my understanding of a place while in residence, and I've spent extensive time in Iceland, Egypt, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, England, and Italy. I always conduct research into a location - the culture, language, politics, economics, landscape - and connect with people at the residency and with the local population as a means of exchange and study.