Julia Couzens | B E S P O K E O L O G Y / Julia Couzens | B E S P O K E O L O G Y

Julia Couzens | B E S P O K E O L O G Y

Exhibition Dates: April 11 – May 16, 2026
In Conversation: Saturday, April 11th at 2pm.
Julia Couzens & Sarah Amos
Reception follows from 3-5:30pm

Bespoke – tailor made to fit the unfit, the cast offs and awkward square pegs splitting the seams of meaning. These textile hybrids emerge from experience, from feeling my way across life’s material spectrum.
Julia Couzens

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited to present the dazzling textile works of  Julia Couzens. Working intuitively rather than executing preconceived ideas, Couzens’s singular approach to her studio practice begins in picking through practical things around her, the mundane heap of life. Taking these things as they are, alert to what comes alive in her hand and triggers her senses, Couzens fashions abstract works both improvisational and acutely considered.

Fabric remnants, paper, wood scrap, thread, bits of hardware and discarded notions from consumer culture accumulate energy and presence as she stitches, bundles, cuts, recuts, patches, layers and folds – sorting possibilities while watching for a move. Tulle is foundational to Couzens’s constructions. She uses it like paint, its transparency and nuanced palette kindle the senses, sending shivers that deliberately undermine Date Night notions of femininity. It’s a fragile medium, but heaviness and density can be felt; identities dissolve into pure form, color fields float and flow, calling
our sensibilities to dance.

For Couzens, questions have a longer life than answers and she intentionally leaves work on pause, the eye, mind, and senses continuously circulating. When she sticks the landing, in irritated fits of resistance to her considerable stockpile of formal conclusions, she pivots, renegotiating the heightened space of charged ambiguity. In these fraught days of divisiveness, such beckoning states offer psychic space on reverie’s higher ground.

Julia Couzens (b 1947) earned a MA from the California State University, Sacramento, in 1987 and her MFA from the University of California, Davis, in 1990. Her drawings and hybrid objects have been shown nationally and internationally at over twenty solo and two-person exhibitions, and fifty group exhibitions.  Couzens received the The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, New York and the Art Matters Foundation Award, New York. Collections include Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; The Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, CA. Exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums Legion of Honor, CA and Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV; Cheongju Contemporary Craft Biennale, South Korea among others. Residencies include the The Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation (RAiR), New Mexico. Julia Couzens is also featured in the recent book TEXTILES x ART, published by Thames and Hudson, 2025.