Parkin, Julie (AUS, New South Wales),
The Opera House Dress

ARTIST STATEMENT

julie parkin

I love the challenge of transfiguring a humble paper bag into something extraordinary like the Opera House. It challenges the idea of ‘truth to materials’ and ‘function follows form’, two key ideas that have dominated art over the past 150 years.

The Opera House was in its time, a radical shift from the status quo. It was a unique and challenging form to materialise. Utzon the architect didn’t know how to construct his own idea for several years until he was peeling an orange and realised that the building could be constructed from a single sphere. I plan to make The Opera House Dress from a similar starting point but reimagine it to fit the body.

Inherent in my idea is the desire to unsettle the fixed categories between masculine architecture and feminised craft. I want to rescript it through softness, ornament and bodily presence. Paper shopping bags, objects of every day labour and consumption transformed into an outfit that claims space and visibility as well as ingenuity and humour.

I have been working with paper shopping bags since I made a Woolworth’s ball gown out of the bags in 2023 for an exhibition called Thinking Outside the Frox. It led me to thinking that all of my work should embody recycled materials as a matter of course. I began painting on paper-bag-canvass stitched together on the sewing machine. After that, I exhibited a body of work based on a 12-month survey of the flowers that bloomed on a track in the Blue Mountains in a group exhibition in 2024 called Excavate. I then used those canvasses to create wearable art that personified the wild flowers. they were exhibited in an exhibition called Sew Long and Thanks for all the Fish in early 2025 and two of the outfits were selected for The Sydney Wearable Art Gala at the end of 2025.

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