Through the past decade, Julia Fish’s visual practice has become evermore intertwined with music, architecture, and language, forming a layered and improvisational approach, allowing her work to unfold in response to both internal logic and external stimuli.

This work continues Fish’s exploration first developed in Threshold – score for six Plans : [ chambered spectrum : east to west ] : for E C N (fig. 1). The color ’chord-stacks’ which appear in this work generate the structure for the recent diptych, works on paper — Study 1, for Eclipse’d : Score for Threshold/s : SouthEast - Two with North [ four hands in dark days, spectra: orange + blue ]. An inspired listener of chamber, art-song, and symphonic music, Fish has drawn from the twelve-tone composition system, translating its logic into her own visual code of color and shape. In these new works, a singular color is nearly always aligned with its respective ‘complementary’ hue, reflecting an ongoing conceptual investigation of partnership.

Her home remains a primary source of inspiration, a space that she has observed carefully and reinterpreted since initial paintings and works on paper of the early 1990’s. Fish has come to recognize that a specific architectural element within her home has found a counterpart ‘elsewhere’—reinforcing this idea of partnership: not a ‘system’ per se, yet suggesting lived experience informed by relational parts.

Fish’s preoccupation with partnership was recently confirmed through another articulation—multiple encounters with the performance of works for piano, four hands: two musicians adjacent at one keyboard, their four hands crossing into each other’s space, strengthened an idea already present in her work—the notion of shared yet distinct territories. This is reflected in her spatial considerations: two rooms and two thresholds, distant yet connected by a shared ‘score.’

The experience of witnessing a partial, yet ‘nearly full’ solar eclipse in April 2024 and its shifting shadows has also informed current work. In response, she ‘cast a shadow’ over the ink drawings smudging them with a gestural dark shape. In subsequent works on paper, Fish has imprinted the ’shadow’ in hexagonal form. A recurring motif in her work, the hexagon echoes earlier sources— for example, floor tiles that cluster as “florets”—connecting organic forms with structured systems. These gestures of layering and obscuring take on a metaphorical weight, particularly in what she refers to as “dark days,” a reflection on current political and global events.

In this work, music, architecture, language and lived experience come together, each informing and reshaping the other.