Hi!

Hello!

My name is Julia Mcgrady and I’m an incoming Senior illustration major! I love working with all different mediums like fabric, papers collages and digital which is why I’m so excited to start my fellowship with artist Kay Healy in South Philly. Kay works with fabric she screen prints and turns them into forms. Most of the forms represent household objects in her most recent work and she uses them to tell personal stories about who they represent. Something that really excites me about Kay’s work is her use of storytelling and the materials she uses. I feel like kay will help me develop my ability to use different materials such as fabric. I run my own etsy shop where I screen print t-shirts so I’m hoping to learn a lot from Kay about how she screen prints on fabric.

I’m also really looking forward to learning about the business side of how kay works as an artist. We discussed her upcoming shows in our initial meeting and I look forward to hearing more about how she prepares for these shows, how she gets in the shows and more about the actual business side of being an artist. Some of the things I discussed doing with Kay include assistance of her inventory, sewing, screen printing and assembling artwork. Along with learning trapunto sewing techniques, printing large scale objects and learning about her studio practices. Something I’m really interested in is seeing how she organizes her studio space and functions. I’m also really excited to learn these new techniques and see how they could traslate in my illustrations and my etsy store products. I’m interested in her use of creating stuffed objects because it’s something I’ve experimented with before but have yet to master.

Kay shares a fun studio space with her husband Greg Pizzoli who is a children’s book illustrator. I see this as a great added bonus to my fellowship since I also happen to be very interested in illustrating children's books. I hope he will also be willing to share some knowledge with me as well!

A goal I have been working on lately is how I can translate my style of mixed media into digital format, so I’m looking forward to seeing how learning these things will influence my illustrations! I think It will be a great experience to see where my work goes and I also hope to be a big help to Kay!

-Julia :-)