Julie Nord - Xenoglossy

In the exhibition Julie Nord - Xenoglossy, Julie Nord (b. 1970) invited us into a strange home where nothing looked the same. Graceful doll girls with shiny almond-shaped eyes, idyllic surroundings and cute pets were transformed into grotesque hybrid creatures, carnivorous plants and underground tunnels.

Julie Nord is an eminent illustrator. In her virtuosic and meticulously executed drawings in pencil, felt pen and ink, delicate watercolours and video art, she turns our usual perception of the domestic and familiar upside down. Unlike her previous works, where the viewer - with references to Lewis Caroll's Victorian tale of 'Alice in Wonderland' - was led down the rabbit hole to a magical underworld, this time it was an imaginative and alien parallel world that emerged from Julie Nord's works and intervened in the real world.

The exhibition showed a number of brand new works by Julie Nord. Expressing a kind of magical social realism, she mixed motifs inspired by children's book illustrations from the 1950s, psychedelic art, outsider art and gothic margin illustrations.

Xenoglossy is a term of highly questionable existence. It describes a form of speaking in tongues, where people in a trance-like state suddenly speak a language they are otherwise unaware of. The linguistic phenomenon unfolds in Julie Nord's works of figures expressing a mysterious and alien language illustrated through psychedelic speech bubbles.