Declaring “no image is safe after it enters my studio,” Julie Cockburn transforms found photographs and paintings into palimpsests, altering their original images with her own imaginative interventions. While Cockburn works with a range of found images, including landscapes, she focuses primarily on photographic portraits. Scouring eBay and second-hand shops, she amasses vintage images of pin-up girls, high school yearbook headshots, and studio portraits of children, among others. With needle and thread, scissors and glue, she overlays embroidered designs, fragmented images, and, sometimes, found objects, onto these portraits, paradoxically changing their subjects into characters of her own imagination while simultaneously seeming to draw out the fundamental essences of each character. Cockburn is fascinated by the disconnect between a photograph and its subject. Through her manipulated portraits, she attempts to undermine the old adage that the camera never lies. undefined

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