Julie Boldt
AUTOMATIC WRITING SERIES
Automatic Writing I
This work builds surface through successive passes of fabric and embroidery through the printing press. Each added textile layer introduces new density and obstruction. The works operate as accumulative constructions, where material layering becomes a physical analogue to textual stratification.
2025, Ink on paper
Automatic Writing (distilled)
This series investigates rule-based creation by moving toward its apparent opposite: intuition. Created through layered plates of fabric and embroidery printed on a single plane, these works foreground gesture, accident, and play. While freed from explicit constraints, they remain in dialogue with systems — testing what emerges when structure loosens but does not disappear.
2025, Ink on paper
the foundation proved faulty, but still, we build upon the ruins
This work extends the language of the Automatic Writing prints into painting, using layered surfaces to explore the palimpsest and the instability between language and meaning. Built entirely from discarded fragments and unrealized experiments, the composition reactivates failed or abandoned material as structural ground. The surface becomes both accumulation and revision — a construction assembled from its own ruins.
Canvas, acrylic paint, jigsaw puzzles, letter pressed paper, embroidered tulle, magazine clippings. 2026
provenance Quilt (a bibliography)
This quilt materializes the act of reading as accumulation. Texts and objects from my desk were scanned together, introducing chance into composition, then printed onto silk and stitched alongside hand-painted panels. The work assembles the intellectual and material sources that shape my thinking into a single textile surface.
Although created years ago, I can still identify each text. They've become that integral to my paradigm. Note the scan of Perec's Life a User's Manual at the bottom, years before I began my ongoing series surrounding the work.
2019. Hand painted silk, acrylic paint, printed scans of text and objects onto silk, thread.
a floating horizon
This work investigates the arbitrariness of measurement and the instability of linear perspective. Built through improvisational layering of screens derived from altered scans of measuring tools and texts, the surface produces subtle spatial disorientation — a horizon that refuses to stabilize.
2019. silkscreen on muslin and organza
Tower of Babel
This work comes from early experimentation with dissecting the aesthetics of written language. I had yet to employ my research based process, but it evidences early activity in the structures and forms that language operates within.
2018. watercolor fabric prints