Baker Artist Portfolios

Julie Wills (b. 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and installation, drawing, text, and intersections between these media. She is recipient of a Creativity Grant (2023) and an Individual Artist Award (2019) rom the Maryland State Arts Council and has been awarded artist residencies at Marble House Project, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Jentel, PLAYA, The Hambidge Center and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (all USA), and at Cill Rialaig (Ireland) and Arteles (Finland), among others. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Plain Sight in Washington, DC in partnership with the Embassy of Sweden and the European Union National Institutes for Culture; Bloomsburg University; Gettysburg College; Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, and at numerous other venues. 

Wills is the founder and director of the former China Hutch Projects, a domestic project space for contemporary art located inside her home, and BREAKFRONT, an exhibition space inside her studio. In addition to her individual studio practice, Wills is one of four artist members of The Bridge Club, an interdisciplinary performance art collaborative active since 2004; see more at www.thebridgeclub.net.

Wills is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Artist Statement:

I create site-responsive installations by arranging cast-off materials— especially those found in the building trades— as “drawings” in three-dimensional space. These installations combine mundane things for their visual and metaphoric effects: brightly colored flagging tape calls attention to invisible hazards. Locator flags mark something buried, while mason’s line is used to keep things straight. I was raised amid the rubble piles of a concrete batch plant that my parents operated, swap meets in the parking lot of the dog track, junkyards, pawn shops and auto salvage lots. I pick up scraps from the ground because I’ve spent my life stepping over things that are half-submerged. These are the materials of my work.

Many of my works incorporate language, and I arrange text as if it too were a physical material. When language is arranged in three-dimensional space, it can be read by an audience in any order and its meaning is no longer fixed. Like the other materials I choose, language is both solid and fleeting, as if it might rearrange itself at any moment. I am interested in what language can and cannot do, what it conveys and what it limits.

My current work addresses climate change, political uncertainty and the peculiar blend of hope and terror that characterize this moment in time, rooted in the uncertainty that surrounds our understanding of our world’s collapse. I frequently draw upon the cosmos as a space of magical or spiritual possibility, where one might find hope for an alternative to current conditions on earth. The night sky offers a space for both scientific and magical inquiry, and through this imagery I explore constancy and mutability, current conditions, and hope for an unrealized but longed-for future.