I Am The Demon My House Is Exorcising: Julie Yeo

Popular media often renders exorcisms as violent events, yet Julie Yeo (b. 1987) has always found herself drawn to the collision between a panicked heart and an immovable one: the pushing, pulling, and tearing of mind and body required to reclaim one's own environment. Later, within the walls of her own home, this same struggle would find an unexpected mirror in Yeo's experiences.

A previous tenant described eleven beautiful years before welcoming Yeo to take her place. Now, rats now come and go to gnaw at her walls, sewage floods and recedes, her roof continues to fail, and her water has bleached her black hair blonde and scarred her skin. It is as if her house is forcing her to leave, as if Julie Yeo may be the demon her house is attempting to exorcise. Unlike the movies, nobody screams. Like a ghost, Yeo continues to search for signs she may have missed: signs that give her a reason to stay.

Within this context, ceramics for Yeo became a mode of survival. After emerging from a decade-long episode of dissociative amnesia, Yeo constructs self-portraits to surround herself with familiarity, each vessel acting as a signal fire beckoning her spirit, Ghoul, home. Now that her spirit has returned, Yeo negotiates between a self that has long been in hiding and one that is slowly thawing, expanding into the fullness of itself.

In her first solo exhibition with Make Room, Yeo anchors this embrace of self in a specific location, exploring exorcism as a form of transition: a negotiation between what once protected us and what now prevents us from moving forward. In the work, Smaller Than My Body, a three-tiered dollhouse stands for the body itself. Ghoul's hiding place lies at its base, buried beneath Yeo's repressions, frozen in place for safekeeping. As memory returns and recognition moves through the body, water travels inward through the structure, slowly melting Ghoul awake. Rising, she begins to inhabit her body once more.