ARTIST STATEMENT
I love when beauty misbehaves—when bright colors and dreamy scenes carry a quiet, unsettling tension just beneath the surface. Symbolism plays a significant role in my work; I’m haunted by symbols and figures that demand to be seen. Each piece is a fragment of my internal landscape, translating emotion into imagery. I create because if I don’t, it consumes me from the inside out. My art is a personal form of resistance. As a queer, nonbinary person navigating the expectations of femininity in a male-dominated world, my work becomes a space where the feminine is allowed to exist fully, to be soft, raw, angry, sacred. In a time when bodily autonomy, queer identity, and migration are deeply politicized, painting is my way of processing survival. I recently left the U.S. and sought a better life with my partner in Australia. That rupture—of place, identity, and safety—shapes the work I make now. My paintings act as portals: part myth, part memory, part protest. Through them, I build a personal mythology rooted in vulnerability and persistence. I don’t aim to offer answers, but rather proof of feeling, of being. My practice honors the messy, emotional, sometimes uncomfortable truth of existing in a body that doesn’t neatly fit the boxes it’s been given. It’s instinctive, necessary, and always teeming with life.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Julianna Finch is a queer, nonbinary artist from Southern California, now living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Through painting and ceramics, she explores personal mythologies, symbolic landscapes, and the emotional tension of inhabiting a feminine body in a politicized world. Her work is shaped by themes of queerness, migration, and internal transformation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from UC Santa Barbara and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
© Julianna Finch