Profile

Julie Millowick began her photographic career working in the darkroom of Athol Shmith, John Cato and Peter Barr. After completing her studies at Prahran College of Advanced Education she worked for 3 years as a press/public relations photographer. The direction of her commercial folio then changed and she worked as a corporate industrial photographer – lighting, both in the studio, and on location became the basis around which her imagery revolved.

Julie achieved early recognition for her photo journalism when she exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for Photography in 1977 [Australian New Work] She has exhibited and published regularly since then, with work being purchased by major photography collections in Australia and internationally. In 1993 her work was exhibited in ‘Intimate Lives’ with Sally Mann, Nan Goldin and Jaques Henri Lartigue at the International Fotofeis in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Julie Millowick’s Melbourne studio specialised in corporate/industrial photography from 1978 with clients that include Shell, Mayne Nickless, Westpac,Victorian Arts Centre, Victorian Ministry For The Arts, R.E.I.V.,Australian Wheat Board, Fluid Freight, Australian Wool Corporation and Fruehauf Semitrailers.

Julie Millowick, Lecturer and Photographer

Academic Qualifications
1977      Diploma of Art and Design PCAE
2000      Master of Arts, RMIT.

Honorary Associate, La Trobe University, j.millowick@latrobe.edu.au

2016 State Library of Victoria commission, How the Library Works Now
2015 Panel Member In Focus: The State of Photojournalism : The Walkley Foundation
2014 Remembrance : 100 Years, 100 Memorials, 100 Stories, Five Mile Press
2010 Nominated for Prix Pictet, Growth, by Linda Groom, NLA
2010 Selected for Look : Australian Contemporary Photography since 1980,
Dr Anne Marsh, Macmillan Art Publishing. http://www.australianphotographers.org/artists/julie-millowick
2009-12 Converted the Photojournalism Course La Trobe University to 100% Online Delivery 

Photographer and Lecturer
From 1978 Julie Millowick’s Melbourne studio specialised in corporate/industrial photography with clients that included Shell, Mayne Nickless, Westpac, Victorian Arts Centre, Victorian Ministry For The Arts, R.E.I.V.,Australian Wheat Board, Fluid Freight, Australian Wool Corporation and Fruehauf Semitrailers.

Julie achieved early recognition for her photojournalism when she exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for Photography in 1977 [Australian New Work]   She has exhibited and published regularly since then, with work being purchased by major photography collections in Australia and internationally. In 1993 her work was exhibitied in ‘Intimate Lives’ with Sally Mann, Nan Goldin and Jaques Henri Lartigue at the International Fotofeis in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

Exhibitions
Selected One Person Shows
2017 All Those Wonderful Country Halls, Castlemaine State Festival, Castlemaine
2016 The Stage is Set, Arts Open, Castlemaine
2016 River Rites, Berri & touring regional S.A., Country Arts S.A.
2015 Before and Beyond, 69Smith Street, Fitzroy
2015 Before and Beyond, Castlemaine State Festival, Castlemaine
2015 Remembrance : 100 Years, 100 Memorials, 100 Stories, Castlemaine State Festival
2014 Many Journeys, Many Stories, Arts Open, Castlemaine
2013 The Photographer’s Presence, Castlemaine State Festival
2012 Very Good Drying Weather, Arts Open, Castlemaine
2011 Castlemaine: of Cars & Christmas Lights, Castlemaine State Festival
2011 Quotations, Ansonia, Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Vic.
2010 Close to Home, Artlab, Adelaide Fringe
2009 Close to Home, Gold Museum, Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Vic.
2009 Traces of Memory, In Their Own Words, Castlemaine State Festival, Vic.
2008 Traces of Memory, VIVID:The National Photography Festival, Canberra, ACT
2007 Traces of Memory, La Trobe Exhibition Centre, Vic.
2006 Traces of Memory, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, Vic
2006 Looking Forward- Looking Back, City of Bendigo, banners, Vic.
2005 A Garden for Hazel, Span Galleries, Melbourne, Vic.
2003 A Year in our lives, Span Galleries, Melbourne. Vic.
2002 Loveletters of a Chinese Lady, Span Galleries, Melbourne, Vic.
2001 A Year in Our Lives, Bendigo Regional Art Gallery, Vic.
2001 Loveletters of a Chinese Lady, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo, Vic.
2000 Paraphernalia, Warnambool Regional Art Gallery, Vic.
2000 Paraphernalia, Photography Gallery of Western Australia, WA
2000 Paraphernalia, Span Galleries, Melbourne, Vic.
1997 Survey, Inaugural Bendigo Arts Festival, Vic.
1993 Intimate Lives, International Photography Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland.
1992/3 Familiar Stories, Watershed Gallery, Bristol, UK &touring the UK.
1991 Mid-career survey, Positive/Negative, Bendigo Regional Art Gallery, Vic.
1990 Familiar Stories, Victorian Centre For Photography. Vic

Selected Group Shows
2015 River Rites, Riverland Art Gallery, Berri, Sth Australia
2015 Remembrance, 100 Years, 100 Memorials, Castlemaine State Festival, Castlemaine
2014 Plenty, Arts Open, Castlemaine
2013 Beyond Reasonable Drought, Mildura Art Gallery, Gallery 101 Melbourne
2010 Finalist Bowness Award, Monash Gallery of Art
2009 Finalist Bowness Award, Monash Gallery of Art
2009 The Edge of Reason : Australian Women Photographers, Bendigo Art Gallery, Vic
2008 Beyond Reasonable Drought, OPH, Canberra [touring through Australia thru to ‘13] 2004 Re-Generation, National Gallery of Victoria, Vic.
1998/9 A Day in the Life of Ararat, Ararat Regional Gallery, Vic
1993-1994 Beneath the Shadow, travelling exhibition from Horsham Art Gallery
1993 Intimate Lives, Fotofeis, Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.
1991 The Jo Spence Show, Cameraworks Gallery, London, U.K.
1977 Australian New Work, National Gallery of Victoria, Vic

Collections.
National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art, Deakin University, Warnambool Art Gallery, National Library of Australia, State Library Victoria, Horsham Regional Gallery, Castlemaine Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery,

Boards
Chair, Castlemaine State Festival
Board Member, Regional Arts Victoria
Board Member, Bendigo Art Gallery

“In Julie Millowick’s Familiar Stories images and handwritten text are a visual autobiographical diary reflecting on childhood memory , mothering and significant events like a death in the family. They are a narrative on domestic life and relationships told with frankness and a sense of humour. This encircles all her themes which capture the laughter, love and tragedy of family stories. Intimate Lives affirms the idea of autobiography as creative fiction, a fashioning of a story, subjective and with multiple meanings in which the photographer can suggest, not control what is revealed and what remains hidden.”

Lorna Waite in Variant magazine UK

Review: Julie Millowick, A Year in our Lives

Millowick’s exhibition is a tour de force in the medium, recalling in a sustained and poignant way the early photograms of Anna Atkins. Like the best photograms in First Impressions, Millowick’s images not only work historically, but exploit the archaic and mysterious character of the technology in order to retrieve something primitive in a given motif.

Her snakes, with their ghastly reflective scales, seem to trade natures with the mineral; her heart – assembled from dismembered petals – destroys the complacent archetype of romantic love; a wig thrashes around with the rhythms of nature as a perfect symbol of vanity. These are not mere studies of nature; nor do they simply recall old archives, but involve a personal expression of signs that have a haunting meaning for the artist.

Robert Nelson in The Age (Wednesday, 16th April 2003.)

“…the Stygian blackness of a humour of Australia’s Julie Millowick…”

Ian Black in The Sunday Times UK

Pushing the right buttons

…Textiles also feature in beautiful photograms in Julie Millowick’s Paraphernalia at Span Galleries. Photograms are photographs taken without a camera. An object is placed directly on a photo-sensitive sheet and exposed to light, leaving silhouette and traces within the form, depending on the transparency of the motif. It helps to have semi-transparent motifs.
Millowick relishes the translucency of voile underwear or lilies, sometimes juxtaposed with sheer silhouettes, in mysteriously seductive images.

The “touch-and-go” technique and the intimate subject matter are actually nothing new. The Australian artist Anne Ferran and the American Adam Fuss havebeen creating photograms of clothing for some time. But Millowick’s contribution is to use the exquisitely feeble lineaments of the technique to reflect on the fragility of the body. The child’s dress in Nursery and the underwear of Paraphernalia are touchingly ghostly.

In Fruit, Millowick exposes a slice of pear to the x-rayish lights of her technique. The core is maddeningly clitoral but evasive, resisting capture and weak in optical senses.

These fugitive signs of the body are paralleled with speculations about a woman’s body and property from archaic times to the present.

My only criticism of this profound show is that the philological content – which is sound in itself – could have been left out of the image-zone and kept either to the titles or to Dr John Pigot’s eloquent catalogue essay. When constructed as counterparts to the delicate images, the quotes and definitions seem pedantic and belonging to the language of graphic design, typographic tricks that trivialise the content.

Robert Nelson reviewing Paraphernalia in The Age (Wednesday, 5th April 2000.)

Pain is the spur in building the image

Five-and-a-half years ago Julie Millowick’s career was flourishing.
Working as a press industrial photographer, she had established a considerable reputation for herself. As an artistic photographer, she had had several major, prestigious exhibitions in Australia and Britain. She was also working as a lecturer and enjoying family life with her husband and child in the hamlet of Fryerstown, near Castlemaine.

But then her life unravelled. Bending one day at work to lift a heavy object, Millowick suffered a disc prolapse that subsequently led to soft-tissue damage. From and then she was confined to her bed and has endured excruciating back pain.

In 1996, after gradual improvement, she carefully made her way downstairs to her darkroom. Still in pain and still unable to lift a camera, she discovered that with some assistance she could just manage to make photograms.

Photograms are made without cameras. They just require a subject, paper, light and chemicals. Millowick had found a way out of her nightmare. Millowlck has based her current exhibition on 29 of these photograms. Starting with beautiful images of a camisole and lilies, she has created a narrative sequence, using both words and pictures, based on the theme of paraphemalia.

“I had all the time in the world to explore the textual possibilities of my art. My bed was always covered in books and newspapers,” she said.

Millowick now sees her injury as a turning point. Time and introspection have allowed her to achieve what has been described by her peers as a stunning exhibition. “This is my first major exhibition after the injury and people are now saying that, besides being strong and confronting, my work has taken on a luscious and sensuous quality,” she said.

Dianne Dempsey in The Age (7th April 2000.)