ARTIST STATEMENT
Within us all is a secret longing to remember our truth, to come back home to our soul. To suppress that longing only creates immense suffering. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. My name is Julia Wozny and I am an artist, a 500-hour certified yoga instructor, and a pre-service K-12 visual art teacher. I grew up in the suburbs of metro-Detroit where I lived with my parents who both work in the medical field and my two sisters. My path to healing led me to find my calling as an art teacher.
My artwork deals with the physical body as a home of the soul, personal ownership of the body in terms of feminism, the idea of connection to the universe, and the uncanniness that happens in between. In 2019, I created my first metal and wood sculpture titled We are We and We are One which consists of a large dodecahedron (12-faced form). Each face is laser cut with a geometric pattern which calls back to sacred geometry of yoga philosophy and alludes to the concept of connection. The sculpture is lit from underneath causing it to radiate with dramatic shadows causing it to metaphysically interact with the space around it. Because light is just vibrations of energy that you can see, but not necessarily feel, this piece transcends the world of the physical and tangible. It represents the soul and the sacred vibration that we all have within us to show that the essence of everyone and everything is energy, vibration, and light.
In 2020, I created a mixed-media intaglio print called You Swallow a Woman Whole. I was considering the notion of consumption in the making of this piece and that what happens around us happens within us. In this, I turned a copper plate into a mannequin-like silhouette with a hollowed-out body inspired by Victorian anatomical diagrams. I filled in the body with cut-out phrases from the 1983 book “The Thorn Birds” which was set in the early 1900s when it was still socially acceptable to disrespect women. Over the words, I screen-printed a bright red anatomical heart. This piece talks about the expectations, objectification, and the ancestral trauma that women carry within them while speaking to the fact that women are human above all and ought to be treated as such.
My intention is to inspire empathy in my audience whether it is through my artwork or through my teaching of art and yoga. I want my audience to realize that we are all made of the same exact particles of the universe and if we spend our lives concerned with someone else’s idea of success and looking outside of ourselves for validation, then we have missed the point. You can read the teachings of the Buddha, the yoga sutras of Sri Patanjali, the Vedas, or The Living Gita to try to find the answers of what it means to be in this body and to have this human experience, but they all say the same exact thing which is that everything you need is already within you. If you sit with yourself long enough, your truth will rise to the surface. My truth happens to be art.