Julia Hall

Julia Hall (b. 1974) is a UK-based artist working between Devon and London. Her Common Thread series focusses on oil-painted and hand-embroidered dresses on bare linen, examining the divide between celebrated “high” art (oil painting) and historically overlooked “low” art (needlework). The series began as a recovery of women erased from history.

Her first group of seven works, MATRIARCHY, investigates her own female lineage. Hall reclaims ancestors often remembered only through sewn objects—samplers, quilts, embroidery—highlighting needlecraft as a matrilineal tradition passed from mother to daughter.

The next series, SUFFRAGE, expands this focus globally. Hall depicts women pivotal in their countries’ struggles for voting rights—often intertwined with decolonisation and racial equality—creating a monument to a worldwide, cooperative movement for female emancipation.

Her current body of work, REFUGE, explores integration, shared humanity, and women’s experiences of rebuilding their lives in the UK after displacement. Through interviews and portraits centred around the image of a dress, she emphasises assimilation over flight. The slow layering of paint and labour-intensive embroidered text mirrors the long process of resettlement, celebrating resilience and challenging divisive narratives about migration. Spanning 80 years of stories, the project advocates for more thoughtful, humane approaches to welcoming newcomers.

Across her figurative practice, Hall addresses social issues and media saturation. In IF NOT NOW (2018), she painted weekly in response to current events—from Gatwick’s drone shutdown to Emma González’s gun-control speech—using slow oil-painting processes to counter the fleeting nature of news. She revived the project in 2020 to document the unfolding Covid-19 crisis with ten additional works.