Julia Jesmee is a third-year Fine Art student at Arts University Bournemouth. Originally from Malaysia, she works primarily with acrylic paint, often integrating drawing and audio into her practice.
Drawing from personal experiences, imagination, and family, Julia seeks to foster an exchange of thoughts and perspectives between her work and the viewer. She embraces the tension between figuration and abstraction, deconstructing and merging forms to create a sense of ambiguity. Through expressive mark-making and layered paint application, her work becomes a means of exploring and understanding her identity.
Julia Jesmee
Back in Malaysia, a medium-sized pot still remains: the one that once nurtured the calamansi plant belonging to Julia’s mother. Calamansi was a defining citrus flavour of her childhood, present in nearly every drink and meal she craved after a hot day. Though the plant is long gone, the memories persist.
She remembers watching it grow from a sapling to being consumed by plump, green caterpillars. Exploring her family’s garden, she always returned to that plant, fascinated by how such small creatures could devour a living form, only to transform within cocoons and emerge as butterflies. Sometimes, she would tear a leaf and inhale its fragrant aroma, imagining herself as a caterpillar – shaped by her surroundings, evolving with time. In that garden, home was both a place of comfort and a quiet teacher, revealing fragments of reality through the lens of childhood imagination.
