A detail of a drawing of the ornamentation of an arch.

Town and Country: New Work by Julie Roberts

12 January – 7 April 2002

Julie Roberts is one of the successful generation of artists to emerge from Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, and has exhibited widely in Britain, USA, Europe and Latin America.

“[Sir James Clark] ordered me abroad before autumn, to be as much in open carriages as possible, and to winter in Italy.”
John Ruskin

In 1999, she was awarded a Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the AHRC), which included work on a Ruskin project. Works newly made for this exhibition included Dear John, a suite of portraits of Ruskin, Millais, and Effie Ruskin/Millais.

A black and white portrait of a man wearing fine clothes. — Julie Roberts, ‘John Everett Millais (after W.H. Hunt)’, n.d.

A black and white portrait drawing of a woman wearing a cape and broach. — Julie Roberts, ‘John Everett Millais (after W.H. Hunt)’, n.d.

Prior to this exhibition, Roberts had recently turned her attention to drawing, offering a further concentration on achieving insight through careful study of the particular. This display included a suite of four large-scale drawings made in 2000: Scotch Mist, A Drop of the Irish, Welsh Rock and English Rose (collectively titled Dysfunctional Family). Being in part a response to the closure of the countryside because of foot and mouth disease, the series questions the component parts of British identity perceived through the accepted clichéd stereotypes of national traits.

A drawing of a thatched stone house surrounded by trees and plants with a man wearing a kilt. — Julie Roberts, ‘Scotch Mist’, 2000

Also on display were some of Roberts’ modern interpretations of others’ paintings, such as John Everett Millais’ The Blind Girl and Philip H. Calderon’s Broken Vows.