The Many Arts of Julie Elkins 

by Charles McGuigan 04.2024

Images courtesy of Julie: Elkins Sara Maslyn Photos

Two things happened when Julie Elkins was very little.

At her grandparents’ home in Stafford County there was a trickle of a stream on the back end of their property that carved a deep gorge through blue marl, slippery as eel skin. And her grandfolks, Frances and Jim Elkins, showed Julie how to cut blocks of this gray clay out of the creek banks which she would then mold into bowls and pots that she would stain with the juice of chokeberries and blackberries and pokeberries, then take them back to her parents’ home where she would set them on the roof to harden in a kiln of sunlight. But when the rains came, the small vessels would melt away and streak the side of the house, dripping down on the windowpanes, and she would hear her mother or father yell, “Julie, what the hell are you doing?” She was seven years old at the time.

Two years before that, at frequent family gatherings, adults would often quiz Julie about what she wanted to be when she grew up.  Julie would answer: “Cookie Monster,” and they would laugh at her. It frustrated Julie that no one seemed to understand her, but she really couldn’t put it into words. She didn’t even have the word, that is until the day she watched Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” on a VHS tape. After the credits rolled up there was a behind the scenes segment. And these adults were doing exactly what Julie wanted to do when she grew up and they even had a word for it. The next time a relative asked Julie what she planned to become as an adult, she said, “I want to be a puppeteer.” And the response was invariably, “You can’t be a puppeteer.”

Although she grew up in Fredericksburg, Julie spent much of her time at her grandparents’ 160 year old house up in Stafford. Her grandfather was a lieutenant colonel in the Marines; her grandmother was a dancer, a basketball coach, a teacher and a painter. Her grandparents gave Julie a magnifying glass and she would spend hours outdoors peering into the secret lives of ants and ladybugs, and the miniature forests of lichens and mosses. Everything a wonder. What’s more, her grandmother Frances would invite her to watch videos of Bob Ross. 

“She did a lot of floral oil paintings and stuff like that,” Julie tells me. “She had this cool studio. She supported and encouraged me.”

When Julie started school, she began to understand at a fairly early age that she was an artist by nature. 

“I couldn’t talk,” Julie says. “I was weirdly mute. People called me shy, but I don’t even know if it was shyness. It was that I couldn’t bring myself to talk to people. It changed when I was twenty-seven.”

Back in her early school days, Julie learned there was more than one way to connect and communicate with her peers. “I couldn’t talk, but I figured out that I could draw and do these characters,” she says. “So in first grade I made this little character called the Bald Eagle,” she says. It was a sort of featherless bird holding its wings across its crotch in embarrassment. “I would slide it over and people would go, ‘That’s hilarious,’” says Julie. “I’d just draw it over and over again; that’s how I made friends.” 

Julie’s mom signed her daughter up for a drawing class. “I became the art kid in school,” she says. And her fifth grade teacher, Miss Horne, let her and a friend perform improv skits after lunch every day. “So I was insanely shy, but I could perform and be this character and make people laugh,” says Julie.

In middle school Julie began to learn about sculptural ceramics, and she had an ah-ha moment about her innate artistic gifts. She was doing a drawing of a doll her grandfather had given her. Julie had no idea how she was able to manipulate the colored pencils with such precision. After all, she had no real training in the art of drawing; this ability seemed to be woven into the fabric of her being.  

“It’s a very distinct memory,” Julie tells me. “I remember it coming to me really easily like I had done it before, but I hadn’t.”

At that moment Julie understood, at least on some level, that she was an artist. “I remember, I said to myself, ‘Oh, I can do this; this is what I do,’” she remembers. 

As she was preparing to graduate from high school, Julie seriously considered joining the Marines. After all her grandfather was a Marine and so was one of her aunts. And her friend Mike, also a Marine, was actively recruiting her to join up. 

Somehow or other though her art teacher, Miss Campbell, got wind of Julie’s plan. 

“You’re not doing the military,” Miss Campbell, a VCU alumnae, told her. “You’re going to art school.”

“What is art school?” Julie asked. 

So Miss Campbell helped her charge fill out the application. “VCU was the only school I applied to and I got in and I got some scholarships,” Julie says.

After completing the arts foundation program (AFO) Julie joined the crafts department. “I was thinking I need to make a living and crafts stood out as something you could make a living at,” says Julie. “Everything else seemed too abstract.” So she learned metal-smithing and ceramics in the crafts studios, and from friends she also learned woodworking skills. 

Julie was drawn to sculptural ceramics, and learned more than a little from internationally renowned ceramic artist Sergei Isupov, who did a demonstration at VCU. “He worked in porcelain sculptures with really bright colors so I learned from him how to make my own under glazes with Mason stains to get painterly surfaces,” says Julie. “I learned a lot of techniques from him.”

More than that though, Sergei advised Julie on how to make a living as a ceramic artist. 

“You can make your sculpture, but hide a teapot in it,” Sergei told her. “Because people collect teapots, and they’ll buy your work if your sculpture’s a teapot.”

Julie followed Sergei’s advice, at least initially, but by degrees the teapots were gobbled up by the sculptures. “The teapots became more and more hidden and then they became not functional and then the spout and the handle started disappearing,” Julie says. “Maybe a tree would be a handle. I have a crazy one of a monster puking up skulls, and the skulls are the handle. I stopped including lids, but I would keep the shape and then gave it up completely.”

At her back, Julie always heard reminders of one of her first artistic loves—puppetry. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, several things happened that would lead her back to those childhood dreams of puppetry.

In rapid succession, Julie’s grandparents and mother died, and the NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) show she was supposed to be in was canceled. 

Julie dropped into a grief hole, and while she was doomscrolling she came across something that sparked her interest. It was a 48-hour film competition put on by Alex Griffin with the Los Angeles 

Guild of Puppetry. Julie signed on. 

“They give you a prompt on Friday night and you have to include it in a film, and you have to shoot it, edit it and turn it in by Sunday,” she says.

Which she did. 

She created a two-minute film with music that her partner created. It featured a ghost puppet and a ghost girl who are trapped inside a house. “The ghost girl takes this piece of cardboard and she makes this very crude blue rabbit mask and puts it on,” says Julie. “And then I have this very over the top elaborate giant blue rabbit mask. The film kind of shutters and then she’s wearing this beautiful giant mask and she leaves the house, and there’s a fox out there that you think is an antagonist. But it’s just some other lonely person.”

There were hundreds of entries all of which were eventually streamed online. “But nothing came of it,” says Julie. 

A few days later, she received an email from none other than Heather Henson, daughter of Jim Henson.

It read,  “Julie, I loved your film, and I have an opportunity if you’re interested.”

Turns out there was money available to create a short film. “So I put together a proposal and quickly turned it in and I got accepted,” Julie says. 

She ended up creating a twelve-minute film called “Playing Possum.” 

“I made it with my friends Lilly, Michelle and Bradley and I still don’t know how I pulled it off,” she says. “I wrote the story boards. I shot it on an iPhone. The whole thing’s a silent musical. It had large scale full body puppets so my puppeteers were wearing large hats. And I made all the costumes.” 

Julie pauses for a long moment. “It was about losing my mom,” she says. “There was this possum character who was grieving. And they’ve got this pink cat that’s a friend and a pet and they go on this adventure and they meet some unexpected friends.” In the not-too-distant future, “Playing Possum,” which premiered a couple years ago at Bonnaroo, will be coming out on Amazon Prime.

Over the years, Julie has produced scores of music videos with her friends. She has also created a likable puppet friend named Murv, who’s something of a journalist. He’s a little like Robert Smigel’s Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, but without the edge and the biting sarcasm. There’s also kind of a streak of Pee Wee Herman in Murv. 

“He’s got a YouTube channel called MurvTube and he does a lot of interviews and he’s got a theme song,” says Julie.  “This is what baffles me—it’s the magic of puppetry—I don’t know what Murv’s gonna say, it’s his own thing.”

She remembers when she first created him. He looked at Julie and said, “How’s it going?” And she said,”Who are you?” To which this puppet, that sort of resembles a blanched Maine Coon, replied,“I’m Murv.”

Since his birth, Murv has really gotten around.  “He went to the North Carolina Pottery Museum,” Julie says. “He went to  Virginia State and interviewed students. He talked to Miguel Carter Fisher about figure modeling and did some figure modeling. He went to a cat show and talked to the cat breeders about breeding cats.”

Throughout her adventure as an artist, Julie has done more than her fair share of teaching, and often she learns much from her students. In fact, a student at Virginia State University challenged her in a way that caused her to examine her understanding of art.

In her classes she would frequently tell the students to make a sketch before they created a piece of ceramic sculpture. 

One of her students protested. 

“Do we have to?” he asked. “Can’t we just go with the flow? Can’t we just make something?”

“It’s not going to go well,” said Julie.  

“How do you know?” the young man responded. “Why don’t you demo something without having an idea first?”

Julie took the bait, and the ceramic sculpture that resulted blew her away.

“It was the coolest thing ever,” she says. “It was basically a portal into the abyss of death and birth. You look into a black hole and have no sense of depth.”

And it clarified in her mind the very nature of art. 

“I realized art is to teach you something,” she says. “Art is the thing you go fishing for in the ether, and you pluck the idea. You become the conduit, you catch the idea in the cosmos and you pull it down and you create it and then when you’re done look at it and you say, ‘What does that have to teach me?’”

Years ago when everything in her life had taken a definite turn south, she and her partner set out on a strange voyage in an improbable craft. They launched their fiberglass canoe and scant belongings at Rockett’s Landing. Their destination: Key West, Florida, via the Intracoastal Waterway. 

“I wanted to do an odyssey and see what I was made of,” Julie Elkins says. “There are too many stories to tell here, but I’m writing a book. We went through the Dismal Swamp, which was on fire at the time. Eighty-one days later we arrived at Key West, and ended up staying there for two years. 

She remembers a rogue wave they encountered off Hilton Head Island. The water was crystal clear and through the wave’s transparent curl they could the broad fleshy face of a sea creature, an enormous organism like the head of a giant puppet, and they thought it might be a shark. “It wasn’t a hammerhead, but it was a giant sting ray,” Julie says. “It was huge, and it slid across my lap.”

It was like an idea out of the subconscious that materializes as art. 

Julie has a show called Resonance at Eric Schindler Gallery that runs through April 21. This 20-year retrospective of her ceramic art will amaze and mystify and have you wondering how clay can be transformed into sculptures, some of which are complex landscapes, others stratified narratives.