Julia O'Gara
Julia O’Gara always had an affinity for the two-dimensional fine arts, but her interest in science was rather stunted by encountering physics in ninth grade. Shortly after entering college, she realized that the thing that would get her out of bed most consistently every day was the idea that she might be able to tangibly help someone survive the next twenty-four hours, so she set her sights on medical school in the long term and a biology major in the short term. Her ceaseless desire to make her life as convoluted as possible (and her love of making things) put and kept her in the combined degree program. As she began to look for ways to bring the concepts she was learning in biology courses into her artwork, she found books to be an excellent form to compile and represent the modes of knowledge she was trying to hold together in her mind. Following graduation, she will dive even deeper into the medical world, taking art with her on the adventure.
"As a premed"... just kidding. As a person fascinated by both the form and the mechanisms of the human body, my work seeks to unite both my areas of study. I am interested in the places where I can reconcile or drive apart the unexpected parallels between the practices of surgery, gynecology, and histology, and the criticism and inquiry towards which an artist is drawn. I try to incorporate historical and anatomical forms, such as knucklebones, the medieval physician’s almanac, and vertebra, with the approaches of medicine through the problem-solving paradigms I have learned from artmaking.