The Proper Introduction

I grew up in the tropics. As a kid I loved to run around barefoot, find figures in the clouds, throw rotten guavas in our mean neighbours garden, replay ‘Takeshi’s Castle’ challenges and sit on the roof.

My family and I are a multicultural mixture between Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany and Mexico. So you might guess that I’m sometimes a bit confused regarding my identity.

Julia Katolla

Generally, I enjoy having conversations with myself and others. I like dancing, talking to my plants, travelling through my inner world, a good old fart joke and if I could, I would still love to sit on our roof.

Playing music as well as listening to it, plays a significant role in my life and in my artworks. Sometimes, I drift away in conversations, just to listen to that one part of the song playing in the background that makes my day. Then I lip sync and make weird hand gestures.

Two and a half years ago my son was born and motherhood has been a big influence in my work ever since. Not necessarily in a glorifying way of depicting motherhood, but more in an honest way of dealing with everything it entails.

I like to work with chance, which is why I tend to use less controllable materials. Though at the same time I often proceed to seek simmetry and balance in the arbitrary. Translating my inner world of forms and images into art, implies dealing with the beautiful and the ugly, the reasonable and the absurd.

Katolla means "on the roof" in Finnish. Nomen est omen, I guess.