Dwelling

Julie Oh | Union House Arts |  May 16 – August 15, 2026
By Rose Bouthillier

 

knock knock knock…

It permeates your consciousness, gently. Insistently. Incessantly. 

knock knock knock…

Half awake, half asleep, you slowly register your location (bed), the time (before dawn), and the source of the sound (a bird, maybe a northern flicker, pecking at your siding). You shoo it away, only to have your attempts to rest interrupted, again and again.

knock knock knock…

These early morning visitors arrived in spring 2024. Julie and I had recently moved into our first house, a salt-box style structure perched above the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny hamlet called Maberly. The house was a container of intention, a form that would hopefully hold this new thing we were trying to become: a family of three. From the beginning, this container felt very porous—the outside was always trying to come in. Saltwater chewed through our porch lights. The wind wailed in through every crack, shaking the house like an earthquake. Carpenters arrived en masse. We heard squirrels scurrying behind the walls and in the ceilings. The birds followed.

 

We nailed up strips of aluminum foil, which instantly blew away. We drew scare eyes on a pie pan we found in the woods, useless but amiable. We ordered commercial bird deterrents that sparkled, jingled, and twirled. The birds ignored them all. Foxes sat plaintively on our walkway, observing the folly. More and more, our symbol of permanence and security seemed like a fragile proposition, a shell being slowly digested by its environment. Efforts could be made to reinforce, to repair, but it felt like we were up against the willfulness of life itself, while struggling to create it. Unruly external forces mirrored the lack of control we both felt while navigating fertility treatments. For Julie, who was trying to conceive, that lack of control was felt most acutely, in her own body. 

knock knock knock…

Julie’s exhibition, Dwelling, is a deeply personal body of work that emerged during this intense time. To dwell in is to live inside, comfortably. To dwell on is to contemplate obsessively, helplessly. This title has a duality often held in Julie’s work with found objects: the ability for things to oscillate, to push and pull themselves through different states of presence and meaning. The objects in this exhibition all have dimensions of comfort, play, nourishment and protection. Subtly altered and intentionally placed together, they also speak to vulnerability, frustration and humility. I witnessed these works taking shape, closeup, through the daily grind of the creative process punctuated by moments of despair, despondency, hope, and joy. This isn’t work that I can write about from a distance. It’s work that’s of my life too, because we share one. 

 

During our bird trials, Julie became obsessed with one product in particular: scare owls made from silver holographic foil, with large wide eyes and intense, all-knowing stares. Pinned up on her studio walls, they became a sort of audience to this moment in our lives, patiently observing our impatience. After a while, Julie cut them into pieces, and reassembled them into larger versions of their own shapes. Titled Protector (Sunrise) and Protector (Moonrise), they stand like sentinels from floor to ceiling, bigger than us. They dazzle with rainbow reflections, but their surfaces are thin, scattered and cracked. When fertilized cells replicate, sometimes a chromosome gets dropped; sometimes an extra one appears. Arrangements of such “abnormal” cells are referred to as mosaics, and they can also be classified as “complex” and “chaotic”—words that contain so much of the essence of life while stacking the odds against it. The Protectors are positioned on either side of a brick pillar, with 15 Circular Road, a miniature wooden house, tucked at its base. The house looks like it’s nesting, set into a small corner that fits it just so, while other forms and forces swirl around it. 

At a thrift store in Halifax, Julie came across a used wellness journal, with entries that track an anonymous stranger’s activities, meals, moods, and challenges, including their own fertility difficulties. Presented just as it was found, The Well Journal offers an intimate glance into one person’s experience; not the artist’s own, but a sort of proxy. Why this book was discarded, and by whom, can be wondered about, but the book itself, as another type of vessel, is strangely compelling. It’s an object that knows someone, a witness to their ups and downs. The process of medically assisted conception can feel like a game: chance and strategy, timing and odds. In IVF checkers, Julie gives this metaphor physical form, a star-shaped checkers board with IVF medication vials as pieces. Julie has likened the path to live birth to skipping a stone on water, trying to get as far as possible while up against time and physical limits. You may or may not get to the other side. Delivery, a hospital blanket folded into the shape of an envelope, carries a sense of the journey’s precariousness. How is it that something, someone, so vulnerable and so precious can be handed to you in such a modest piece of fabric? 

 

A single work, Pouch, occupies the back gallery. It consists of the hollow half of a large bak (박) gourd that Julie found last summer at a flea market in Seoul, the city she was born in. Floating serenely on the wall, its surface has oddly fleshy and planetary qualities, rounded, cratered and stretched. The lights remain off in this gallery, but the south-facing windows let in shifting rays that move across the gourd, waxing and waning. Inside, it holds a single grain of rice: potential. Outside, in the garden, Cluster hangs in an apple tree. This piece is made up of red and gold bells detached from the scare owls, tied together in a tight formation. It looks as if it could keep growing, adding to itself. When it was put up in May, the tree branches were all barren, and the bright orbs popped out against the muted landscape, which was just emerging from a long, dark winter. By the time the exhibition closes in August, Cluster will be surrounded by green leaves and fruit.  

How does creating art prepare you in any way for creating a new life? There are romantic parallels to draw, but the most important one is the hardest: that both require sitting with doubt, the unknown, the unclear, and accepting what may or may not come through it. 

Rose Bouthillier is an independent curator and writer, currently based in rural Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland).

This text was originally commissioned by Union House Arts, to accompany Julie Oh’s exhibition Dwelling, May 16 – August 15, 2026.