Julia Marchand investigates the fragile boundary between the human experience and nonhuman world, examining the ways we shape, interpret, and insert ourselves into the natural realm. She is particularly drawn to the psychological and cultural processes through which we anthropomorphize plants and animals, project our narratives onto them, and attempt to create meaning through constructed stories.
Her practice often begins at gardens, zoos, and natural history dioramas, spaces that exist in a state of contradiction, at once natural and artificial. For Marchand, these environments embody a tension between the longing for a connection with nature and the impulse to control, curate, or distort it. From these points of departure, she constructs her own layered realities, creating images that investigate dislocation, acclimation, and renewal while blurring the line between what is organic and what is fabricated.
In her recent work, Marchand has turned this inquiry inward. After being diagnosed with cancer, she began to experience her own body as a kind of constructed landscape which was shaped and altered by medical intervention. This shift has deepened her engagement with ideas of estrangement, transformation, and survival. Within her current practice, imagined plants and animals inhabit internal terrains that mirror both the altered realities of her body and her shifting perception of it. These creatures and plants function as metaphors for the foreignness and resilience that illness and treatment impose. By translating personal experience into a visual language of hybrid landscapes, she illuminates how disconnection and adaptation can give rise to new ways of perceiving both the self and the world around us.
Marchand studied painting at San Francisco Art Institute, holds a BA in Art History from American University in Washington DC and a Master’s degree in Art Education from Boston University. Currently, she lives and works in Oakland CA.