Julie Peppito: Making a statement through textile art

With an innate sense of political rights and wrongs and a deep empathy for humanity, Julie Peppito creates sculptures, collages, drawings, quilts and tapestries to depict a narrative, an idea or make social or political comments.

Julie seamlessly integrates plastic litter, objects from nature and collected items along with drawn and painted imagery into her works. She arranges and rearranges her composition until she is happy, then sews it together, adding stitched, repetitive patterns and paint to finish her work. The collaged, conjoined nature of her work is symbolic of our interconnections to each other and to our planet.

After a huge knock to her confidence at college, when her work was derided by people lacking an understanding of the concept of textile art, she gained strength from her professor’s positive response. She began to assert herself, moved to a more supportive environment and has gone on develop an important body of work during her career.

Julie received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2004. In 2001, she received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship for sculpture. She has produced seven one-woman shows and shown her work in many other joint exhibitions.