Designer Teacher Textile Artist
Grounded in naturalism, the inner dialogues of Julie’s life journey are evident in her art and the two are inseparable. Together with a love of fabric and stitch, Julie’s work is embedded in the natural world and the Fine Art of drawing painting and printmaking, the disciplines of Design and the Crafts of textiles have shaped the ways she uses stitch, threads, colours and cloth. They are sparse, refined elaboration. Those inner conversations become unique, meaningful and highly personalised, expressive art works. A lifetime of bulging pockets, collecting the discarded, the used or broken, saving the treasure of every walk, documenting with drawing and photography; these are evidenced in professional practices, but inherent in all is the beauty of nature.
In the art and textiles of Julie Haddrick, nothing is unnecessary. Her disciplined approach features careful designing and restrained use of colour, technique and materials. Julie embraces the Japanese aesthetic of “Wabi Sabi’” that values transience, imperfection and the impermanent.She finds greatness in the overlooked details; the grace of ageing, imperfection and of beauty in decline. Julie’s Wabi Sabi is outdoors in quiet, insignificant and inwardly oriented places and her treasure is in the discarded; a feather, a stick, a shard of china. Julie hand dyes, prints and paints fabrics, often combining/ layering them with vintage cloth. Her stitching is measured, decorative and purposeful and her thread rich textiles are complex and quite unique.
A multi award winning artist, Julie is passionate about art, textiles and teaching, exhibiting widely; her art quilts touring in juried exhibitions worldwide. Recently, Julie was awarded the acclaimed Rajah 2018 award for her contribution to quilting in Australia. An annual award given by Expertise Events, Julie is the 13th recipient of this award. An accomplished and popular art-quilt teacher, Julie has published 40+ patterns; distributed through ‘Haddrick on fabric’ She is a qualified secondary teacher of Visual Art and Design with 35 years’ experience in that field. Her quilt teaching of 18 years has encompassed an art approach to fabrics. Her students embrace new ideas and the opportunity to further develop their technical and creative expression as well as upgrading skills in the art and designing that underpins contemporary, modern and art quilt making. She has been fortunate to curate and take a quilt exhibition to USA in 2015 and was engaged in teaching whilst in Houston Texas. Following this, Bernina Japan engaged Julie Haddrick as a teacher and guest artist for their 2016 Tokyo, Fukuoka and Osaka quilt shows, which was a major highlight of her teaching schedule. Julie enjoys the local Australian and New Zealand quilting community, through judging, public speaking and teaching various art textiles practices. She continues her service at a state guild level as a Judging panel and exhibition jurist.
