There are three children under five. Overthere we build our house. Overhere we live/breathe/love/birth in a single room with no bathroom. Somewhere nearby my mother is slowly ailing. I care for her. The children and I stop by the side of the road to pass snacks, take a piss, rescue an owl, move the body of a snake, a tortoise. Look at the way the light hits those empty eyes – the leaves – my children’s translucent skin – my mother’s hands. The wild geese still call. Chaos and order fold into each other.

Addiction runs in the family. I will sacrifice for a hit: pick up the camera, write a sentence, bury my hands in the soil. Of course, something gets left behind. In the creative act, I put my body up hard against it: terrors, delight. Something always gets left behind. In a fervent attempt to hold what cannot be held, I go back for it again. Grief is praise and this is a temple.

…

Julia-Rose van Haren is an Australian lens-based artist and writer living and working on Jinibara Country. Moving between poetry, photography, and writing for performance, her practice explores the body, ecological intimacy and queer feminist theory.

Julia’s play Samson premiered at Belvoir St Theatre and La Boite in 2015, earning her the highly regarded Philip Parsons Fellowship. Julia holds a BFA from QUT and an MFA in Writing from NIDA.

Drawn to care and connection, Julia later completed a Bachelor of Nursing Science while living in remote Central Australia. She continues to work in both emergency and palliative care settings. This clinical experience shapes her art- tender, unflinching, and attentive.

Between 2019-2024 Julia gave birth to three children—one in hospital, two at home. Birth continues to inform her practice, which circles around the body as a site of rupture, knowledge, pleasure, ritual, and abjection. She weaves personal and ancestral histories through image and text.

Julia was a finalist in the highly regarded National Emerging Art Prize, 2025 and semi-finalist in the 2024 Head On Photo Festival. In 2025 Julia was awarded a Sub Tropic Studio Residency through the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Julia’s work has been published by Currency Press and PlayLab Inc, and her poetry has appeared in The Australian Poetry Journal.