Julie Rrap

It’s the sort of image that makes you smile and shudder at the same time. Julie Rrap’s Overstepping (2001) is a square-format digital photograph depicting the artist’s calves and bare feet. Her toenails are painted red; the skin of her ankles is creased; and her heels are shaped like stilettos, as if her bones and flesh have morphed into an inbuilt, permanent pair of high-heeled shoes. It’s a work which prompts us to contemplate the cosmetic and surgical interventions women willingly submit to in conformity to the dictates of ‘beauty’ and fashion, and to imagine the grotesqueries that might ensue when this willingness remains unquestioned and unchecked. Rrap created the work having been invited to enter an art prize organised by a footwear company – who she assumes were expecting her to contribute a sculpture, not a two-dimensional work in which the sculpting has been effected by means of digital technology. Among the best-known of Rrap’s many works, Overstepping exemplifies signature features of her practice: the use of her own body to contest the depiction of women in art; her gleefully subversive appropriation and deconstruction of established codes in visual culture; and what art historian Ann Marsh has described as the ‘renegade experimentalism’ with which Rrap devises means of refining the incisiveness and wit embedded in her works. Portraiture, especially self portraiture, is another preoccupation, although not in the sense of seeking to show something about herself. Instead, for Rrap, portraits are a method of drawing attention to questions about the nature of looking and seeing, the function of representation, and the visibility – or invisibility – of women in the art world, especially as agents or creators. As she explained in 2023, ‘I’ve donated my body to the history of art as a kind of reflection on the fact that history can be very reductive and revisionist’.

Julie Rrap is one of the most influential artists of her generation, her career spanning five decades and encompassing performance, photography, installation, video and sculpture. Born in Lismore in northern New South Wales in 1950, she did a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Queensland from 1969 to 1971 and was influenced by the activism of the time, particularly feminism and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Her introduction to art came through working with her brother, the artist Mike Parr, on his performance works, and through her increasing engagement with other practitioners experimenting with concepts and techniques. At the same time, she perfected her skills as a photographer while running a business that specialised in photographing artworks for magazines and books. Her subsequent experience of living and working in Europe, she says, ‘really tested and proved my own inner drive to make art’.

Her persistent curiosity about different mediums and processes – photography, performance, activism and what Rrap has called her ‘restlessness with materials’ – fused in Disclosures: A Photographic Construct, Rrap’s first major work, which also formed her first solo exhibition at Sydney’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1982. A single-room installation, Disclosures included 60 individual black-and-white prints suspended from the ceiling to form two corridors. On one side of each row were portrait-format photographs of the artist, nude or nearly so, with a camera hanging from a strap around her neck. On the other, landscape-format photos showed Rrap in the act of capturing herself by simultaneously setting off two cameras – the one around her neck and one on a tripod on the opposite side of the studio. Disclosures examines voyeurism, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the power imbalance inherent in the act of looking. Yet in making viewers experience the work by walking between the rows of mirrored images, Rrap constructs a sense of how it feels to have lenses trained on you from both sides – to be the viewed rather than the viewer – making it ‘a work about what photography does to a subject,’ she says, and specifically about what the camera does when it is pointed at a naked female body. In this way, Disclosures also speaks to another characteristic Rrap has subsequently observed of her practice – that of ‘feeling the need to engage the audience very directly, almost as performers themselves in the work’.

As with other early works, Disclosures also signals a critical juncture in the development of Australian feminist artistic practice. Photography in the 1970s and 80s was defined and dominated by First Nations and women artists concerned with creating their own realities, actively reclaiming the depiction of themselves and their communities. Postmodern techniques and approaches – deconstruction, appropriation, blurring distinctions between pop culture and fine art – helped sharpen the messages in their work. For Rrap, her background in performance art was equally significant. Invoking the personas of the thief and the trickster and the tenets of 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, Rrap created series of works – including Persona and Shadow (1984) and Secret Strategies/Ideal Spaces (1987) – in which she cast herself as an anarchic feminist photobomber, invading paintings by male artists to negate the tradition of situating women as passive objects. ‘The trickster as a persona allowed me to slip through these gaps in art history and disturb the balance,’ Rrap says. ‘The trickster character in art was also beautifully described by UK-based art critic Jean Fisher as a way to characterise those artists who use play and irony to disrupt our normal perceptions of the world and its representations. I really related to this proposition.’

For Persona and Shadow, a series of nine photographs, Rrap photographed herself naked and then inserted these self portraits, printed as individual fragments, into reproductions of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s paintings of biblical subjects – the Madonna, the Pietà, the crucifixion and so on.
‘I was playing mischief by using my body to disrupt stereotypical depictions of women in art history,’ Rrap says, staging symbolic break-ins ‘not in order to steal something but to occupy the space of the owner’. The ideas of trespassing, stealth and infringement are integral also to Secret Strategies/Ideal Spaces, created during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1987. With ready access to places such the Louvre, Rrap made museum visits during which she took deliberately crappy photos of canonical European paintings of nude women – such as Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque and La Baigneuse – using 35mm slide film. Back in the studio, she projected the developed slides onto the wall and made drawings from them. The drawings in turn became the backdrops for photographed performances in which Rrap enacted womens’ ‘escapes’ from paintings which had trapped their subjects in scenarios of vulnerability and violence, and the fate of being ogled ad infinitum. In addition, the series distorts what Rrap described as the ‘ideal space of the museum’, her process of creating reproductions of poor-quality reproductions constituting the de-composition of grand, centuries-old oil paintings and their usurpation by works created by a woman artist.

This same subversive intent connects Rrap’s earliest works to her subsequent ones, in which she increasingly points to the nature of portraiture, in particular the representation of women as they age: ‘I think that’s much more interesting from a feminist perspective because it alludes to a double invisibility – the representation of women artists historically, and the general societal view of the older woman.’ Works such as 360 Degree Self Portrait (2009) provoke ‘a discussion about how we look at portraits’, and how we respond to faces that are presented in ways which confound or ignore traditional, familiar poses and expression. Concurrently, Rrap has continued to explore various mediums and methods, energised by fundamental questions about finding the most inventive, potent ways of conveying her ideas. ‘Risk in art is a really important thing,’ she has said. ‘The longer you make art, the more you know how to go about it. So how do you trip yourself up? And then it’s a problem-solving thing – how do I make that? – and that’s the bit I really like’. 360 Degree Self Portrait, for example, originated with a simple enough question: what do I look like upside down? ‘Things occur to me, and I play them out in the little studio of my head,’ she says. Rrap then devised a way of realising the idea which involved strapping herself to an oversized turntable, fixed to a wall, and then filming her face as she slowly rotated the 360 degrees of the title. To create the finished work, a silent, single-channel video of almost 11 minutes’ duration, Rrap spliced together individual frames of footage into a single head shot that maps the gradual distortion of her features as they turn, literally, from expressionless to seemingly anguished, from resting face to one that’s strained and upended and back again.

The same inventiveness characterises Blow Back (2018), gifted to the National Portrait Gallery by the artist in 2024. A collective portrait composed of individual photographic images, Blow Back depicts 33 contemporary women artists, among them Rrap herself along with Janet Laurence, Rosemary Laing, Petrina Hicks, Anne Ferran, Nell, Cherine Fahd, Salote Tawale and others. In making these enigmatic photographic portraits, Rrap asked each sitter to perform the act of breathing out. She then hand etched a sheet of glass with an impression of her sitter’s exhale – what she calls an ‘exchange … me making the breath for them’. Each portrait is framed with the etched panel positioned slightly above the surface of the photographic print, so it appears as if the sitter’s breath is misting onto the surface of the glass. As each breath is unique to the woman producing it, its visualisation and permanence creates a poignant layer of identity and representation. As Fahd says of the work: ‘Moving along the wall from one breath form to another, one woman’s portrait to another, from one artist’s face to another, I am reminded that like Julie, each of these women is a creator, an artist, a thinker, a maker. This is significant in a world, an art world, dominated by mythology that is gendered male. And to this, Blow Back is the collective woman; here she speaks a breath that states I am here/We are here.’

Rrap’s 2024 self portrait SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders) similarly engages with ideas of presence, visibility and immutability. The monumentally scaled sculpture, the winner of the Melbourne Art Foundation Commission for 2024, challenges conventions of figurative public statuary by replacing the heroic, idealised male figure with two lifesize bronze casts of Rrap’s own body, one balancing precariously on the shoulders of the other. Thighs fleshy, face wrinkled, breasts drooping, tummy slumping. ‘I was thinking about the usual problem of women artists and their lack of historical visibility and about standing on the shoulders of giants, and then I wondered, “Whose shoulders do I stand on?” In a kind of jokey way, I realised I have to stand on my own shoulders,’ Rrap told writer Jennifer Higgie in 2023. Four decades on from Disclosures, Rrap continues to interrogate questions of women’s representation in art history, turning long-established traditions – including portraiture – against themselves to assert her presence and that of numerous other women creators.