Julie Dowling

Julie Dowling was born in Subiaco, Western Australia. Growing up in both semi-rural and urban areas in a large Badimaya extended family. Working in a social realist style, Dowling draws on diverse art traditions including European portraiture and Christian icons, mural painting and Badimaya First Nation iconography. Dowling works like an ethnographer, recording the deep-seated injustices in the Indigenous community. Her pictorial works have a strong political edge, however, she speaks as a de-colonized subject and subverts the traditional power relations between the observer and the observed, the colonizer and the de-colonized. Since her first solo exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre in 1995, Dowling has earned a substantial national and international reputation as an artist of extraordinary vision. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, notably at Art Fair Cologne in 1997, Beyond the Pale: Contemporary Indigenous Art, 2000 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and the RAKA AWARD: Places that name us, ‘Strange Fruit’ a retrospective of 15 years at The Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2003. K1 5 Cologne - Germany in 2017, 'Babanyu (Friends for Life) Art Gallery of Western Australia 2018.