Julie is a visual arts lecturer at North Metropolitan TAFE in Western Australia, where she has spent years helping students find their creative footing. Her training began in jewellery and object design, and gold and metalwork have stayed close to her practice ever since, even as her work has shifted toward teaching and technology. Her own art making, though, told a quieter, more frustrating story than the one she was helping her students write.
For a long time, Julie moved between ideas without settling into any of them. She'd start something, then be pulled toward the next before the first was resolved. The vessels she kept returning to, a familiar shape from her early years in ceramics, never quite felt finished. It wasn't a lack of ideas holding her back. It was the confidence to see a piece through and put it out into the world.
Take Two entered her life almost by accident, through a Lorna Crane workshop that appeared on her Instagram feed. Something about the way it was presented told her it would be worth her time. Once she began, the production quality, depth of content and generosity of the artists were unlike anything she'd experienced in an online course, and she was hooked from the first module.
Julie had followed Tina Marais's work for a long time before Take Two announced a course with her, and she had loved it for just as long. So when she discovered that Soft Revolution was going to launch, there was no hesitation. She set a reminder in her phone so she would not miss enrolment, determined not to let this one pass her by.
What she found once the course began matched, and then exceeded, what had drawn her to it. Each module carried a substantial amount of content, delivered at a pace she genuinely enjoyed, and Tina's generosity in sharing her process ran through every part of it. By the end of each module, Julie noticed that she had not simply picked up new information. Her own ideas and her own work had been pushed a step further each time, until she found she had built a full body of work that continued to inform what she made afterwards.
The clearest sign of that shift sits in Julie's own studio, in the piece she brought out partway through our conversation to show what had changed. Beside it, she placed one of her older vessels, a form she had made many times over the years and still counts among her favourites, but one that had never quite reached the resolution she was after. The newer piece told a different story. It had taken shape during Tina's course, built through a slower material process that asked for patience rather than certainty about the outcome.
What makes the piece distinctly Julie's own is what she added once that material process had done its work: beaded detailing, drawn from the jewellery training she has carried since her earliest years as a maker. It is the part of her practice that keeps surfacing no matter what else she is working on, and in this piece it finally had somewhere to land, folded into a body of work built through an entirely different material language. The result was not a technique borrowed and set aside. It was two long-standing threads in her own practice meeting for the first time.
The opening For Julie, the deeper change the course produced was not really about materials at all. It was about following a piece all the way through to being finished, something she had struggled with for years. In the past, she says, work would get put aside, half-resolved, because she was highly critical of what she was producing and reluctant to put herself out there. That pattern had cost her more than unfinished pieces. It had cost her the confidence to trust her own instincts once a piece reached a difficult stage.
Working through Tina's modules gave her something to push against that habit. Each stage of the course asked her to keep going rather than start over, and by the end she noticed she had far more clarity about where a piece of hers was actually heading, rather than abandoning it partway when doubt crept in. That clarity has begun to reshape how she works even outside the specific techniques the course covered, changing her relationship with her own process as much as her materials.
The course's final stretch, focused on exhibiting and how to prepare work for a public audience, has had a lasting effect of its own. Julie describes it as the piece that gave her the confidence to start exhibiting her own work, something she had not felt ready to do before. She is now preparing to do exactly that, and while she is candid that the outcome of any exhibition remains to be seen, the fact that she is stepping toward it at all marks a real shift from where she started.
That same shift has begun to show up in her teaching life too. Julie has always made artwork to support her students, but she notices now that she is starting to separate that from what she wants for her own practice, giving her own creative direction more room rather than letting it sit permanently in service of the classroom. It is a small distinction, but for someone who spent years unsure of her own direction, having any direction at all to protect is a meaningful change.
Asked what she would say to an artist weighing up whether to take a Take Two course, Julie does not hesitate for long. "I think I would recommend it," she says, pointing to the quality of the artists who teach, the standard of the video production, and how easily the courses fit into daily life. For her, the value goes beyond any single course. Lifetime access to the material means the knowledge keeps paying off long after the weeks of live teaching end, adding to whatever she takes on next in her own creative practice.
Where Julie goes next is still taking shape, but the direction is clear. She wants to put herself out there more, and to keep exhibiting rather than letting finished work sit quietly at home. It is a modest ambition on paper, but for someone who once could not finish a piece without doubting it into a drawer, it is the truest measure of what has changed.
The vessel gave way to something more resolved, and this time, Julie let it stay finished.