Project Description
Julia Sharpe
FSC-Harvard Fellow 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24
Julia Sharpe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a third time fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard. Her filmmaking, painting, and writing practices engage personal memory, poetic syntax, and studies of visual culture to question the role of clarity in representation. Her dissertation, Opacity and its Forms: Multiplicity, Potentiality and Critical Fabulation, argues for formal readings of opacity as a counter-aesthetics that produces speculation through absence.
FSC Works
Missing Woman Part I: The One With Violets In Her Lap Mostly Goes Astray (work-in-progress)
Julia Sharpe
The One With Violets in Her Lap Mostly Goes Astray is a 16mm film project that imagines five days in the life of Jenny, a heroin addict who’s gone missing from her rehab center. By creating a visual narrative for Jenny as a present, albeit “missing woman,” this project uses the singular to examine the place of the “missing woman” in literature, film and contemporary media.
The Couch Is Purring (work-in-progress)
Julia Sharpe
The Couch Is Purring documents the conversations of two filmmakers as they translate Didem Madak’s poem Pulbiber Mahallesi from Turkish into English. In response to these conversations, the filmmakers create images that engage the poem’s central themes of domesticity, pregnancy, anxiety, and the creative process. The resulting film is a documentary fiction that speculates on communication as a process of translation from interior self to exterior environment.