2021
Archival pigment print on fine art paper
Each print is hand-signed and individually numbered by the artist

Julie Progin’s tendency to anthropomorphize vegetables in her drawings is rooted in memories of her childhood. Growing up with a strong aversion for greens, she and her parents relied on attributing human traits to veggies concocting witty anecdotes that would make them more palatable.
In her Steamed series, Julie Progin recalls and expands on these stories reimagining the familiar locally handmade bamboo steamers as steam saunas where vegetables are rendered socializing, unwinding, and blowing off steam within the stacks of woven bamboo tiers.
She explains, “At the Spa and The Bath House are two prints that emerged spontaneously when I remembered my distaste for vegetables. Today, cooking—and vegetables—play an important role in my life. Spending time in the kitchen is a way for me to let off steam and decompress when I am anxious. My work being like a visual diary where I combine emotionally resonant materials from my everyday life, images of vegetables relaxing in the vaporous moisture of a steaming basket come to me quite naturally.”
From a distance the prints look like common depictions of bamboo steamers but upon closer inspection details of asparagus using prawns as neck rests and eggplants slowly cooking, wearing towels folded into yangmeori’s (a style of head towel wrap resembling sheep horns and worn in bathhouses), surprise the beholder. Julie Progin shares, “There is an interaction between the familiar and the unrecognized, which confounds the expectations of the viewers—it takes time observing the works fully to realise the absurdity and the humour I instil in each piece.”