As a contemporary fiber artist, Julie Kornblum combines ancient arts with the immediacy of the plastic pollution crisis. She weaves, knits, crochets, and make baskets from the stuff we all throw away: disposable packaging, abandoned plastic objects, and industrial surplus. She uses copper wire from the electronics recycling yard. She collects plastic bags and bits of packaging that were trashed after one use. She has gathered boxes of audio and video cassette tapes. She picks up broken hubcaps and five-gallon-container lids from gutters and sidewalks. These materials did not exist physically nor conceptually until the latter half of the 20th century. Physically, they are by-products of industrialization. Conceptually, the notions of one-time-use, disposability, and surplus, are modern inventions.

Julie’s awareness of these issues grew while she was an art student at California State University Northridge. She began to discover there are literally tons of waste material around, at the same time she was developing her body of work in basketry and weaving. “I am continually reminded that many people do not want to just throw stuff in the trash, and they love to give it away to someone who will use it. At CSUN we had lots of wonderful yarns and other things that people had donated for the students to use.”

Julie loves the concept of combining some of the oldest hand crafting processes with the surplus of some of the newest industrial by-products. Historically, these ancient arts were utterly essential throughout human society. Textiles and baskets pre-date the making of glass and ceramics. They were our containers and fasteners for tens of thousands of years. Now they are not so necessary, just like the heaps of (plastic) materials we have developed to replace things like baskets and textiles. This intersection of New-Yet-Disposable and Ancient-But-Not-Obsolete is at the core of her work.

Over the past 15 years, Julie has exhibited widely, has been published in books and magazines, and has curated art exhibitions. She speaks about the plastic pollution crisis that informs her artwork and teaches workshops.

Five primary examples of Julie’s work illustrate a variety of concepts that inspire her, and elements of art she employs:

Gyre - is a wall piece constructed using the coiled basketry technique. The title refers to the ocean gyres where vast amounts of plastic garbage congregate in five locations in the Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, Northern Atlantic, Southern Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

Our Layer - asks the question, "What will future anthropologists discover in our layer of the archeological record?" Natural materials at the bottom give way to plastic and wire at the top.

I’m Still Here speaks in the voice of disposable plastic objects, thrown away, not gone away.

Pacific Rim - addresses Julie’s place of residence in California, which is a major contributor to the plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean.

The Fifth Element - is inspired by the movie of the same name, in which, the fifth element is love (the first four are from the ancient Greeks: earth, air, fire, and water). The elements are expressed by the colors of disposable plastic shopping bags interwoven with cotton yarn. Love is at the center, represented by pink and purple, the colors of passion.

Julie’s love of fiber arts is rooted among her earliest memories of her mother at the sewing machine as she played with fabric scraps on the couch across the room. Her grandmother knit and crocheted constantly and taught her to crochet during one of her family’s summer visits from Arizona to their hometown in Pennsylvania. She learned to sew in Junior High, and it was like she was born to do it. She says, “All they had to do was show me the instructions and the tools and I knew what to do.” From then through her senior year in high school she sewed all the time. She also explored embroidery, crochet, macramé, batik.

When she arrived in LA at the age of twenty, the only real skill she had was sewing. Sewing for income lead to the Fashion Design program at Los Angeles Trade Technical College and becoming a pattern maker in the garment industry. Marriage and children followed a few years later while teaching Fashion Design at Otis College of Art and Design and attending night classes to complete her AA degree. Julie taught at Otis for seven years and transferred to California State University Northridge to complete her bachelor’s degree in Art.