Experience work-in-progress, Index (Maternal), by artist and writer Julia Rose van Haren, developed during her R|Artist Residency: Sub Tropic.

Through Index (Maternal), Julia invites audiences to inquire into how we inherit the stories of the body, how they are repeated, rewritten, and sometimes resisted. This mixed media collage brings together vernacular, newly created, found, and archival imagery to construct a fragmented genealogy of the maternal body.

Index (Maternal) draws on post-structuralist feminist theory to reframe the maternal not as a fixed identity but as a transmission, an ongoing intersubjective process between generations.

Join us for the showing and artist talk where Julia will share her process and the contextual frameworks underpinning her project.

Event Details

Where: Sub Tropic Studio, 23 Cooma Terrace, Caloundra
When: Wednesday, 29 October
Time:

5:30pm - 6:15pm: Open Studio with drinks and nibbles
6:15pm - 7:00pm: Artist Talk

Cost: Free | RSVP essential

Parking:
Free parking available at the Caloundra Bus Interchange (top two levels).

About the Artist

Julia Rose van Haren is an Australian lens-based artist and writer living and working on Jinibara Country. Utilising multiple genres and forms, her practice explores the body, ecological intimacy and queer feminist theory.

Julia’s play Samson premiered at Belvoir St Theatre and La Boite in 2015, earning her the highly regarded Philip Parsons Fellowship. Julia holds a BFA from QUT and an MFA in Writing from NIDA. Drawn to care and connection, Julia later completed a Bachelor of Nursing Science while living in remote Central Australia. She continues to work in both emergency and palliative care settings. This clinical experience shapes her art; unflinching and attentive.

Between 2019-2024 Julia gave birth to three children- one in hospital, two at home. Birth continues to inform her practice, which circles around the body as a site of rupture, knowledge, pleasure, ritual, and abjection. She weaves personal and ancestral histories through image and text.

Working with analogue traditions of image making, Julia is a 2025 Finalist in the National Emerging Artist Award. She has been featured multiple times in Best of PhotoVogue and was a semi-finalist in the 2024 Head On Photo Festival. In 2025 Julia was awarded a Sub Tropic Studio Residency through the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Julia’s work has been published by Currency Press and PlayLab Inc, and her poetry has appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal.

Julia’s practice is porous, existing at the intersections of art, mothering, and care.

R|Artist Residency: Sub Tropic is delivered by SCCA as part of The Refinery. The Refinery is supported by major partners, the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, Sunshine Coast Council through the Regional Arts Development Fund, the Creative Ecologies Research Cluster at UniSC, and Media Partners In Publishing through IN Noosa and Hello Sunshine Magazines.