BIO
Julianne Merino (°1991, Hickory, North Carolina, United States) is a New Orleans based multidisciplinary artist. She graduated Massachusetts College of Art + Design in 2014.
Play is a primordial instinct. As a multimedia artist based in New Orleans, I have been profoundly shaped by the city's carnival culture and its suspension of everyday reality. This environment has catalyzed my development of costuming, puppetry, embroidery, and beadwork as interconnected artistic practices.
My work marries conceptual structure with psychological exploration, using play as a tool for working through trauma and examining the objects we create, value, and discard. Growing up between two extremes—a mother struggling with schizophrenia and addiction on one side, and a methodical board game designer father on the other—fundamentally shaped my artistic inquiry. I joke that I am both parts of my parents: left-brain theory meets drastic right-brained suspension of reality. My father's approach to game design follows three principles: start with an inspiring object, define the rules of interaction, and consider the emotional experience it creates. He theorizes that games predate language, functioning as tools for survival and social interaction—safe spaces for exploring problem-solving and power dynamics. This framework deeply informs my own practices.
Though I trained in 2D fine art, I became captivated by kinetic art through Mardi Gras traditions and puppetry. I deliberately work in mediums outside my formal training to preserve uninhibited experimentation and rule-bending. My practice centers on constructing detailed fictional universes through wearable and manipulable objects.The central theme in my practice is the exaggeration of human excess. I am interested in the tension between overindulgent opulence and the environment of manufactured consumerism and material waste that produces it.
Embroidery and beadwork serve as the literal and conceptual thread connecting my work across costume, puppetry, and object-making. These repetitive, meditative processes mirror the function of transitional comfort objects used in therapy—they ground the maker, allowing mind and body to act as one while freeing deeper cognitive processing. The meticulous craft of hand-beading or embroidering builds narrative detail into each piece, layer by layer. Every bead placement, every stitch becomes a deliberate choice in constructing its own materiality.
My worldbuilding approach treats each piece as an entry point into invented universes. Costumes and puppets don't merely adorn or animate—they establish characters, mythologies, and entire ecosystems of meaning. Through accumulation of detail—texture, pattern, material choice, color relationships—I construct immersive environments that exist adjacent to our own reality. The process is archaeological in reverse: rather than excavating layers to reveal history, I build layers to create new histories and worlds with their own internal logic.
Marionettes and costumes offer users safe disembodiment—a temporary suspension of self and reality. They function as avatars that allow psychological distance and roleplay. Like game pieces on a board, they create safe spaces for exploration of power dynamics, problem-solving, and identity within the fictional worlds I construct.
By upcycling discarded materials—transforming them through embroidery, beadwork, and assemblage—I convert the mundane into something simultaneously angelic, surreal, paranormal, and grotesque. This transformation isn't just aesthetic; it's narrative. A headpiece made entirely from trash becomes a crown in an invented mythology where waste is currency, where excess is religion.
This investigation aligns with New Orlean’s carnival culture, which wraps primitive revelry and community creation around the darker aspects of societal overindulgence. Coveted Mardi Gras beads are made of toxic single-use plastics, celebrated one night and discarded in storm drains the next. I create exaggerated mythologies that reflect and distort our material reality, inviting viewers to examine their own relationships to excess, celebration, and waste.
By inhabiting contradictions—between beauty and waste, control and chaos, trauma and play—I invite audiences into worlds where excess is mythology, where discarded objects become relics, and where the liminal spaces between celebration and decay hold their own transformative power.