School of Creative
Industries
Julie Heather Liew
Julie is a graduating art therapist and freelance artist with seven years of experience in creating visual art for film and television projects.
With a background in fine arts, she understands the importance of aesthetic attunement and has taken on an arts-based relational approach to creative engagement in her beginning art therapy practice.
During her time in the MA Art Therapy programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Julie had the opportunity to provide art therapy services to children in a residential care group home, as well as young adults with autism in a day activity centre. She is also passionate about working with young artists with disabilities, and hopes to empower individuals with creative self-expression to foster resilience and independence.
In her thesis, Julie explores supporting material exploration for children coping with neglect in residential care, and how art therapy thrives as a modality even if ‘art’ is not embraced by the clients.
Work
I always turn from the house that made me
Mixed media
60 x 20 x 60 cm
(2025)
I always turn from the house that made me serves as an exploration of intergenerational trauma, and the painful dichotomies of unresolved desire for both individuation and connection.
Furthering their exploration of the house imagery in their practice, Julie attempts to recapture the intimacy of memory using the language of the miniature and abstract. Like two halves of a brain, the artist is of two minds: the rigidity of an unthinking conventional reverence for authority remains in constant negotiation with the freer form of a developing relational understanding of aesthetics.
This body of work also emerged as an artistic response to her beginning art therapy practice with children in residential care, in order to process and contain the complexities of trauma recovery in that setting. The pernicious effects of maltreatment and neglect may run like fault lines along a house’s foundation, like hairline fractures causing significant displacement in the healthy development of one’s creativity and identity.
One of the greater challenges is to help young clients reimagine a way of being that is not defined by their traumatic histories, but rather allowing two ever-present realities to meaningfully coexist. Viewers are invited to consider the unearthing of their own realities and contradictions, and the lessons we still hold onto that no longer serve us in our unfolding of new ways to be whole.
