Artist Statement

Julia Woldmo (b. 1997, North Vancouver) is an artist based on Xwe’etay/Lasqueti Island, Canada, whose work responds to encounters between bodies, stories, environments, ordinary objects, and the natural world.

Working across graphite, paint, collage, textiles, and clay, Woldmo builds through layering, accretion, spontaneity, and attentive planning. Collaboration is a significant branch of her practice: a way of working in relation, and of discovering what becomes possible when an idea is shaped between and shared among people.

At the core of her practice is an abiding reverence for the ordinary, the odd, and the other. Forests and flora act as sensoriums and incubators, while the minutiae of seeds, eggs, and stars recur as intimations of change and becoming. Her works are often populated by elements from the more-than-human world and cosmos alongside familiar objects from quotidian life—the net, the gumboot, the mirror ball.

Seeing the artist as a kind of world-builder, Woldmo creates images as relics of inhabiting a fragmented yet generative world: sensuous records of being alive within living systems, bodies, and stories. Her works aspire to be harbingers of awe.

Julia Woldmo received her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 2021 and completed a five-month mentorship with Rima Staines in Devon, England, in 2026. Since 2022, she has served as Vice-President of the Lasqueti Island Community Arts Council and is currently co-leading the development and building of The Clay Commons, an off-grid ceramics studio in the Salish Sea.

She has presented two solo exhibitions, How Do We Become Good Ancestors (2024) and Salt on a Daydream (2022), and participated in an international residency at the Icelandic Textile Institute in Blönduós (2022). Her collaborative projects include the Xwe’etay Welcome Mural (2025), Lasqueti Cemetery Mural (2024), and Baffled Cyanotype Installation and Festival (2023). Her written and visual work has been published in Folklife Magazine (2025) and American Anthropologist (2025).