About Julia Wheatley

My work comes from an interest in distortion as both a visual phenomenon and a cultural condition.

Using a glass block window as my primary device, I paint scenes as they appear through its fractured surface. Light bends, bodies warp, and space dissolves. The window becomes a stand-in for the small glass we carry everywhere, our phones, through which the world is always filtered, abstracted, and just out of reach.

In my collages, I cut from fashion editorials, images already shaped by aesthetic control. Having spent years working within industries built on image production, I am deeply aware of the creative power embedded in distortion. Cropping these into new compositions becomes an exaggerated intervention.

By translating these distortions into paint, I slow down a process that is usually instantaneous. The paintings hold the tension between seduction and obstruction, between intimacy and distance. They ask viewers to sit with the awareness that what they see has always been shaped by someone else’s perspective.

Distortion, in my work, is not a flaw. It is a language.