Supples Gallery transforms into an enchanted woodland for Julia Phetra Oborne’s Epiphytes (July 26 – September 7, 2025), where feminine forms emerge from painted trees like whispered secrets. This compelling solo exhibition explores ancient connections between women and forests through layers of oil paint and cross-cultural mythology.
“There’s a profound dialogue between the artist’s philosophy and her chromatic choices, each hidden brushstroke becomes an inner journey toward pleasure and discovery, a pathway through the rejuvenating breath of ancient woodlands. Oborne’s mastery lies in her young yet technical execution, and her ability to channel the forest’s universal stage as a space where duality breathes within her own strokes of red and green, where there is an inherent relationship of palettes and conversations between the artist’s emotional landscape and the mythical terrain she conjures. What emerges is a powerfully charged question: do these intense colors represent emotional gaps, inner desires left unspoken? The exploration proves fascinating because color provides both the gossamer softness of petals and the vibrant intensity of raw emotion, perhaps memories crystallized in pigment, perhaps moods distilled into form…”
P.J. Art & Culture Editor
The Forest as Universal Stage
Oborne’s latest paintings transform woodland into something both familiar and otherworldly. The female form threads through these landscapes as an essential part of the forest’s DNA, drawing from her dual Thai and British heritage. The Buddhist tale of Nariphon, trees bearing fruit shaped like women provides one mythological strand, but these aren’t mere folklore illustrations. They’re reimaginings that speak to contemporary questions of identity and belonging.
Layers of Time and Memory
The exhibition’s title references Epiphytes plants growing upon other plants as metaphor for how stories accumulate on canvas. Osborne builds surfaces through mark-making that simultaneously reveals and conceals, influenced by expressionism yet serving organic processes of inner journeys. Her brushstrokes carry temporal weight, mirroring how memory fragments overlay and inform each other.
About the Artist:
Julia Phetra Oborne (b. 1995, Hong Kong) lives between Bangkok and London, holding a BA from Edinburgh College of Art. Following her 2024 residency at SAC Gallery, Chiang Mai, Epiphytes marks her solo debut at Supples Gallery.
Epiphytes offers rare insight into how personal mythology illuminates universal truths about memory, identity, and our relationship with nature.
With the act of painting underscoring her practice, Oborne blends myths, folklore, and autobiography in paintings that explore memory, identity, and reimagined visual languages. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Southeast and East Asian imagery, her work shifts between abstraction and figuration.
She recently completed a residency with SAC Gallery, Chiang Mai (2024), and Epiphytes marks her solo exhibition at Supples Gallery.
Supple Gallery Map | 361 Charoenkrung 43, Bangkok | E: contact@supples.co T: (+66) 06 1095 1905
Paris Jacques | Art & Culture Editor
Photos courtesy of Julia Phetra Oborne
This article is a complimentary editorial courtesy of The Silomer, a business and lifestyle blog based in Bangkok.
