Julian Laffan

Julian Laffan is an Australian educator, a printmaker-artist specialising in wood-blocks, and a curator of artistic exhibitions. He lives in historic Braidwood, New South Wales. Laffan has been a picture book judge in 2018 for the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA), and a judge for the 2022 Braidwood Festival of Young Writers.

Education Laffan studied at the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art and Design in Canberra, graduating in 2004, before earning a Bachelor of Education from the Australian Catholic University (ACU). After working as a teacher, he is completing research at ANU.

Artistic approach Laffan's speciality is contemporary woodcuts and drawing, specifically using wood-cut blocks as a medium in their own right. He uses these mediums, and mixed media, to create sculptural objects that explore connections with history and place, identity, and natural environment. He has worked with communities, in Australia and internationally, using both carving and relief prints to evoke "a language of connection and socio-political vehicle for collaborative practice." Generally, rather than printing from his woodblocks, Laffan has featured the finished blocks as self-standing artworks.

Laffan illustrated the 2018 children's book by Gary Crew, titled Leaving the Lyrebird Forest.

Residencies, travel, and gallery works Laffan held a residency at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), 2004. He travels regularly and has worked on cross-cultural print projects in south-east Asia, in East Timor, Indonesia, and the Thai-Burma border. He was a key member of the Culture Kitchen, a collaborative Canberra-based print group, Inside Information, 2007 Momento (Suki & Hugh Gallery), 2016 Illuminated Artefacts (Beaver Galleries), 2019 Home front (Beaver), 2020 Relief (Megalo Print Studio), 2020 Voyages, 2020 The Return of the Archive (Megalo), 2020 Julian Laffan (Mutual Art), 2022 Tree Songs, 2024 Wander Wonder, 2025

He also produced an exhibition series, to develop mentorship partnerships among established and emerging Australian artists.

Research Laffan's research, through the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University, Canberra, is concerned with "the narrative life of the tree in the woodblock". It explores a liminality between trees, the structure of woodblocks (as remnants of living beings), and the prints that eventuate, and unpacks "how the lives of trees shape our understanding and our identity ... in a multi-species way", given that human beings have an "entangled relationship" with trees and with the materials we use that feeds an "aesthetic co-production between human artists and more-than-human beings". Accordingly, with reference to Japanese and Mongolian traditions, Laffan conceptualises woodblocks as both "sacred records", and as "subject with agency inscribed with material histories" that illuminate nature-cultures and speak to the disjunct between the slowness of wood growth and the rapid mass-production of modern imagery. Laffan expounds on these ideas in his publication, "Locating Traces of Arboreal Beings: Connecting the Tree and the Woodblock".

Reviews A reviewer for Canberra City News states that Laffan's images are "personal evocations" using "an idiosyncratic variation of the old craft of woodblock printing". Laffan creates, through his portraits of birds, and tree silhouettes at dusk, "a poetic atmosphere just before darkness descends... a time that can give rise to romantic nostalgia and evokes ... the works of the Australian artist Sydney Long (1871–1955) whose paintings created the idea of an Arcadia in the Australian landscape."