Hande Eagle: It’s been almost a decade since we last got together to talk about your work. We were introduced by Jules Wright, founder of  The Wapping Project, who unfortunately passed away in 2015. I remember it as such an exciting time talking about your work in Namibia… I would like to start off the conversation by asking you about the locations for your work…  The three decades your land and tidal art has taken you to diverse landscapes in Libya, Namibia, Japan, Italy and the UK. What are the must-haves of an area to be suitable for your artistic production?

Julie Brook: I think it’s a combination of an intuition of understanding when I know I need to explore another landscape. In a way the landscape influences – in a sense – the exploration and discovery of the work. If I take myself to different environments and landscapes that inspires new ways of working. What probably triggered it when I first went to Libya. I had been working in Mingulay in the Hebrides while I was bringing up the children, and in 2007 or 2008, I had to prepare for the trip. I remember just thinking, Meredith, my youngest was about 2 years old, I thought I really need a change and I was given the opportunity to go to Libya which I knew very little about. I thought how incredible it would be to go into the desert. It was like nothing I had ever known. I absolutely fell in love with being there. In Libya, at the time, it was compulsory to travel with guides. I had to travel with camel guides and these wonderful Tuareg men I met. We got on so well. It also showed me that I could do these trips guided by local people which was very enriching. They show you their landscape in a very different way. By then I felt very uninhibited with the work and that was very liberating to see that I could work freely even with guides as I did solitarily. When the Arab Spring came about, I was very keen to do a third year in Libya, but the war didn’t allow that. Then I was casting around for another landscape, not particularly similar. I remember thinking about the Namib Desert, it’s a very ancient desert and again I didn’t really know very much about Namibia. Then I did quite a lot of research, I called a friend of Chris [Christopher Young] and I, who’s a filmmaker. She grew up in South Africa, and she had worked in Namibia. When I mentioned I was thinking about going to Namibia. She knew my work very well and she told me, “Yes, that’s where you should go, I was thinking how brilliant that would be for your work”. Namibia was another revelation. By that time, I’d understood about having local guides, and they really helped me with my work, which is very unusual. They really joined in physically. I then went back for five years. I have a relationship with the National Art Gallery of Namibia. I felt very much at home there. I interacted with a lot of people. I always go and get permission from local communities even if it’s very wild and remote. I learnt that through my work in Scotland. If you really take local people into account and ask their permission to be there, they are so appreciative of that rapport that they are more open about you working in their environment. It’s immensely rich to be able to work really effectively with people whom you don’t share a language. When I was in the north-west of Namibia, I had a big team of Himba women and men. My guide was really my translating conduit because he had beautiful English as well as Herero. Even if he hadn’t had English I would have been able to work with them.

Japan came out of being shortlisted for the Daiwa Art Prize. I had this instinct that Japan would be very interesting for me. When I was shortlisted I researched about being there. I just had a very good feeling about it. Of course, it’s been an incredibly rich experience even though it was slightly thwarted by Covid but I am going back there in June to exhibit. I’m really looking forward to heading back that way and showing work there.

The work in Japan came about because I was talking to people and expressing that I was interested in places that are yielding stone, old clay pits… I got leads through people who show a bit of interest in my work. They would tell me which places they thought I’d find interesting. One place led to another. In Japan I worked much more closely with communities. I want to keep working in Japan if it’s possible. And I just opened up this relationship with Carrara in Italy. I hope in the next ten years I combine doing things like the commission in Abbot Hall with pursuing my own wild work. I found doing the commission really interesting. It’s a bit different when I am creating my own environment, as it were. I think it brings another whole set of challenges, which I am very interested to do. It’s absolutely true I am much more in my element outside. To be given the chance to be able to make a work that is accessible to the public and I have to think outside the box. It’d be very good for you to see this new work. I think you’d be very intrigued by it.

H.E: Yes, absolutely. And to answer the rhetorical question that is the title of your first substantial publication What Is It That Will Last, I think even if no trace of your land and tidal art remains in the future, this book will last. It offers such a unique journey through your artistic practice and way of living. I loved reading the essays in the book but most of all, the notebook extracts. I felt that you were so humble in the way you describe all that you do. I think the art you make is beyond what you can call it with words. The heavy-lifting, taking such precise measurements, estimating the light, photography and filmmaking, the notebooks peppered with beautiful, detail descriptions… It’s so astonishing, all-encompassing, intriguing, and engaging. For how long have you been keeping a written account of your work?

J.B: I have kept notebooks ever since I was on Jura, since the early 1990s. That’s remained a very crucial part of my exploration of the work. In a way, keeping tabs on my time. When you are solitary, and you don’t have moments to share. One’s natural inclination is to record the details because you lose the details in memory. I’m very interested in writing about Jura. I now work with a lot of art and literature graduates. I think that if I can inspire young people to follow their own artistic language, if I can give something of my writing and help them keep their courage that would be a wonderful thing.

H.E: Do you intend to publish more of your writing?

J.B: I am talking to someone who would like to try and help me write an account of being on Jura. It’s one thing enabling extracts to be recorded in a book like I have in this book but it’s another thing to create a written book. I really hope I can bring that to fruition in the next couple of years. It’s not like a memoir but more like an artist’s handbook. Not in the sense of how to, or this is how, but really encouraging that each of us have a very unique way to find our way through life, whatever we do. This has just been my particular way. If that can inspire, make you laugh and cry and make you feel really excited about life, then it’s great. Life is a bit enigmatic at times, it’s difficult to navigate. It turns us upside down. I know that for me, my work is a great anchorage. It’s what keeps me grounded and in the absolute swim of life. I think that’s what I would want to pass on to young people, just go for it, don’t stand on the side-lines. Life is getting more complex to navigate with all these so-called human aids, like technology. It makes life even more complex for our children. They have a huge amount of impact on all levels, I certainly didn’t have as a child, and you had less of as a child. At the same time, I am not a writer. It's finding a confident way of just being myself in writing. I read a lot, so I feel a bit intimidated to venture into that. The art of writing is really profound. I’ve got to keep it light in my hand so that I don’t get self-conscious because I think then it will all go wrong.

H.E: I noticed that in your descriptions of the work in What Is It That Will Last you appeal to most human senses. In your land and tidal art, you work with all the four elements of nature, earth, water, air, and fire.  But, for example, the scent of fire and the ocean when working on the Firestacks, or the scent of the quarries you worked in are missing from these accounts. Do you leave out smell/taste from your notebook accounts on purpose?

J.B: I love this, Hande. I was telling one of my kids yesterday – she also goes to quite remote places – I said, oh it’s so funny because I never thought that I miss out on this. I haven’t got it in the book, but I know did record, not very long ago, that smell of cordite when stone hit stone, because one of my students love that smell, if I am hammering a stone she’ll say I’d love to make a perfume of that smell. Really I think smell is super important, and taste. And I think smell – like sound - is a much more powerfully nostalgic sense than sight actually. Thank you for that. It’s not knowingly that I’ve omitted it. I think I’ll be much more alert to that. Firestack is full of smells, because you’ve got the fire and water, and then you’ve got this incredibly juicy sound when you start getting the fire meeting the water, of course the smell of that is really intense. I’ve just forgotten to note them down… When you move around different countries you are always using your taste, tasting the food, the air, the stone dust. I think you’ve opened up a whole new aspect to the work.

H.E: You’re welcome. Taking a step back to discuss the heavy-lifting and the manual labour involved in your oeuvre… Do you think it has taken a toll on your body?

J.B: I think it’s kept me very strong and fit actually. I feel very healthy. I recognise I do need more help now. I can’t lift such heavy weights anymore because I would hurt my back. I just don’t have that brute strength I had when I was in Jura. The beautiful fall-out of that is that I recognise I need assistants. I feel it’s a new way of teaching. I don’t teach formally anymore like I did when I did those big educational projects when my children were growing up. I chose to step back from that to give more time to the work. And I don’t teach in an art school. I think weirdly in a very informal way, the graduates who help me, they keep coming back. They actually learn a huge amount just by working alongside me and I think it’s a wonderful way of learning, it’s all very uncontrived. And I learn from them all the time. I also learnt about managing people, making sure they are safe, happy, and looking after themselves. That’s just become integrated into the practice in a very positive way. I love solitary work, but I recognise now that to take on a very heavy piece would just be silly. I would just hurt myself. Whereas I can spend time exploring on my own, so I am very grateful for that that I still feel so physically fit and strong to be able to do all that - but equally it’s very good to share the work.

H.E: Are there any jaw-dropping accidents from the last three decades that you would like to mention?

J.B: Well, touch wood! Not that many. I have to say I had a few jaw-dropping moments in Namibia. One was – I had a lovely group of people helping me – one of them did get a finger trapped under a very heavy stone. It split the finger, but it didn’t break it. We took him to a surgery about five hours away and we discovered it wasn’t broken and it was restitched up and it healed really well.

H.E: Five hours journey with a split finger!

J.B: Yes, I always carry a very extensive first-aid kit, I cleaned it very well and pinched the split together with butterfly stitches and bound it. We drove him in the 4x4 to the surgery. We managed to get him into surgery as quickly as we possibly could, and the nurse kept him there for a few days and she said he would be fine. Another student of mine, who is based in Glasgow, she also had an unlucky moment with a stone, but we were here in Skye, so we were very close to a hospital. I have been very lucky to not have had very extreme accidents.

I do remember a very exciting moment, which I think I recount in the book when I just pointed out something I wanted to look at and the driver, Lolo, in the 4 x 4, to be helpful, because we were in the riverbed, and he was aware there were animals around although we were still in the daylight. He pulled nearer to where I wanted to get out and have a look, we went into a soft part of the riverbed and so the 4 x 4 sunk down and we couldn’t get it out.

H.E: In my past review of your work, I was truly fascinated by your use of the Himba pigment when we met at The Wapping Project. How did the idea of sharing the Himba pigment that you found in Namibia with Raku san in Japan came about? What a fantastic idea to share it with another artist in a completely different part of the world.

J.B: When I went to Japan for the first time in 2015, I was very lucky to be introduced to Raku san. At the time it was a very formal. He was very busy and said he could only give us fifteen minutes. First of all, his wife gave us tea in his bowls, and we had a long and amazing conversation about his work. And then he came in, and at first, he was very formal. He loves the Firestacks because he works with fire to fire the bowls. So there was a lot of correlation. Then I said to him, after about ten minutes, there is something really special I need to show you. I showed him a little bit of the pigment film, with the red pigment swirling round and round [notedly, from 05:35 in the film hyperlinked here]. He got closer and closer to the screen, he was amazed. I asked him, whether he would like to use some of it for his work. He replied, “most definitely”. I didn’t have any of it on me at the time. After showing him the swirling pigment, I also showed him the work I did in the quarry, the film on channelling light. He just jumped up and said, “wait, wait I’ve got to show you something”. He brought back a book of the Tea Pavilion he was commissioned to create at Sagawa, just outside of Kyoto, where he was given a blank cheque to create a space for his bowls. He’s created one of the most beautiful museums I’ve ever been into, where he began underground and he used natural light; and gradually the rooms get more and more full of light and a series of floors, and different walkways where you go up into the next layer, and he’s channelled light. We were both electrified to explore this common ground in our works. I can say now that he is the artist I feel the uncanniest rapport with even though we are at absolutely two different worlds. I then showed him more of the work of how I channelled the light, it was really inspiring. That was the birth of our friendship. He, then invited me to give a public talk with him. We recently saw each other in London, when he had a show in the UK – first time he was in Britain – and we have to use an interpreter we can’t communicate – he has no English and I have no Japanese. But we have this incredible rapport. I feel so uplifted and so opened up by conversation with him. And I know he feels the same. He is a real radical in what he does, and I think that really came from our fascination with light and the elements. I think what he loves about my work is that I am not bound by a tradition in the way that he is. He’s had to work within the parameters of tradition. Whereas I’ve had to discover what my own parameters are. Those invisible rules that art always imposes.

I remember sending a bag of the pigment to him with a translated letter, “Dear Raku san, here is the pigment collected from an incredibly remote cave in Namibia which is part of a sacred mountain. Isn’t it wonderful, it’s travelled by sea from there to me in Scotland, in Skye, and now I’m sending it by aeroplane to you in Japan.” We loved thinking about this global and cultural journey. When I went to the firing [of the bowls], I saw bowls being fired with that pigment on. It was a very poignant moment. In time, I would love to gift him a big drawing. I feel he is so special, Hande.

H.E: Yes, I read this in the book and even though I was not a part of this journey I found it really emotional, it touched me deeply.

J.B: Oh, I’m so pleased! If the writing can give something of that really profound emotion like I felt when I met him, I feel so pleased because that’s what I really want the work to do.