Artist

With a background in jewellery,
there's lots of things that I don't know about forming steel,
so I just have to make it up as I go along. But this works really well. Hi,
I'm Julie Moselen and I am an artist/ sculptor.
I chose being an artist as a career because it is my biggest,
strongest passion in my life,
and also probably because that was pretty much what I was really good at,
at school. This is my studio. Come have a look.
So in my studio I create 3-dimensional sculpture.
I write proposals. I meet with clients,
they come and see what I'm working on. Making money as an artist,
I normally get commissions from clients or I put my work into an exhibition.
This is a project that I'm working on at the moment. Here is all my scrap metal.
These are all my maquettes. Maquettes is another name for models.
So I make a small model first to make sure that it's gonna work.
This is a maquette of this one in steel.
A really big challenge for me as an artist is having to write proposals
for exhibitions, clients. But I'm not a writer, I'm a maker,
and so I just want you to look at my work and decide what you think and see
if you can figure out what I feel and not ask me about it . The most
rewarding part of being a sculptor is finally seeing your design
come to fruition.
So from a 2-dimensional drawing on a piece of paper or an fleeting idea in my
head to an actual physical 3-dimensional form.
And then if you sell it because someone loves it,
then it's just an added bonus. Being a female working in steel is quite
challenging.
Challenging in the sense that I feel quite underestimated a lot of the time.
I wanna prove to myself I can do it,
but I also wanna prove to the rest of the world I can do it,
that women can do it 'cause we can do anything. I went to art school
in England. I fell in love with metal.
I had to decide between jewellery and sculpture,
and I ended up studying jewellery.
You don't need a degree to be an artist, but it definitely helps. At university,
they teach you how to be an artist.
I didn't really understand that fully when I was at university,
but now I totally understand why they did it the way they did it,
and I'm so grateful that I have those skills and there's no way that I could
have figured that out by myself.
So I definitely recommend getting a degree in art.