Fall '09 :: Artist in Bloom
X-ray Visionary

X-rays and MRIs. These ghostly black and white images captured for a specific purpose are quickly forgotten beyond the doctor’s office. An unlikely medium, perhaps, but one with a deeply entrenched connection for a certain artist.

Creative since childhood, Julia Barello trained in jewelry and metalsmithing after college, receiving her MFA in Metalsmithing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1992.

“It had room for me to do any kind of work I wanted,” says Barello. “Some people were doing functional or sculptural or wearable.” Her interest in adornment and how we choose to decorate our bodies drew her to jewelry that could be “meaningful and conceptually rich.”

In 1996, Barello created a series of brooches based on the idea “of making jewelry that had no gender associations.” The brooches’ design was inspired by surgical illustrations from 1906, particularly the vascular system. When not worn, the brooches would be displayed on the corresponding area on an actual X-ray attached to a light box, much like the ones in doctors’ offices. She also started framing bits of film into silver jewelry.

Those early works focused on the exposed film differently than her art does now. At first glance, the material’s makeup is not discernible. It could be plastic, maybe even the thinnest glass. Closer inspection reveals the telltale shading, the subtle shift between opaque and translucent areas. Still, most of us would have to be told what we are seeing.

This new art was a departure for Barello, and she learned as she went. At first, she started cutting circles of X-ray film and stacking them in different patterns. More complex shapes followed almost organically. Pinwheel-like flowers, initially hand-cut with a scalpel are now (thankfully) laser cut from templates. The vibrant colors in Flush, Genome III, and Swale (her floral designs) occurred by accident. Barello had attended a workshop on dyed monofilament with Nora Fok in Boston and tried dyeing her film back home in Las Cruces where she teaches at New Mexico State University.

“I got frustrated at first because it wouldn’t dye. Then I discovered that it was the MRI film that wouldn’t take the dye after throwing in some X-ray film that did,” she recalls. Barello hadn’t noticed a difference in the materials until that fortuitous moment.

The un-dyed MRI film carries more clearly the film’s capture image, particularly in Bluster and Swoop, one a collection of leaves and the other of birds, respectively. Even dyed, however, the X-ray’s images do appear, the residue creating a unique color pattern as the different densities absob the dye. “The X-ray provides a variegated surface, like heathered yarn versus regular yarn,” Barello explains.

It might be easier to use plain sheets of acetate, but for Barello the art hinges on the real exposed film. “Behind it all is wanting to see the body on them,” she explains. “It’s important to me that they are pictures of people. I look at these pieces as being collections of individuals and similarities and differences. The film is a metaphor for human beings.”

That desire for connection to humanness has typified Barello’s art from those very first brooches. “The things I cared about 15 years ago are still things I care about,” she says.

Pick up our Fall 2009 issue, which is available on newsstands this month, to read more about how Julia Barello’s philosophy on art breathes new life into this unusual medium.

Fall 2009 | By Melissa Brown | Photos courtesy of the artist and Zane Bennett Gallery