Julia S Rasor is difficult to describe with a single title. Artist, Inventor, CEO. She is a powerhouse…
Speaking to her feels less like interviewing someone about a career and more like tracing the shape of a mind that has spent a lifetime making things.
Her award-winning work has been featured all over the world, and heavily featured in private & public collections, including the San Diego Botanic Garden. (Photomontage of sculpture Modernism Vibe)
Long before she became known for her abstract sculptural figures, Rasor began her journey as an inventor of lifesaving medical devices.
Raised by a father she describes as a brilliant inventor and engineering physicist, and mother who embodied entrepreneurship, the art of invention was never treated as something extraordinary in her household — it was a way of engaging with the world. Questions were encouraged. Learning was constant. Curiosity seemed built into the architecture of everyday life.
Genevieve M Rasor, Julia S Rasor and Ned S Rasor.
Julia S Rasor High School Senior, Class of 1970
"Questions were encouraged. Learning was constant. Curiosity seemed built into the architecture of everyday life."
Legacy of Invention
Her father worked across medical devices and energy conversion systems, creating the world's first intracardiac pacemaker in the 1970s — a technology so far ahead of its time it wouldn't be fully realised for another four decades. Rasor followed naturally into that world, pursuing higher education before joining her father's company and beginning a journey that would prove equally groundbreaking.
She became an inventor in her own right, developing the world's first ultrasonic contrast agent — pushing the boundaries of what science could imagine, let alone achieve. Medical science, experimentation, problem-solving: she moved through all of it with the ease of someone who had never been told to slow down. Eventually she became a CEO, driving her inventions and passions to their absolute limits. But somewhere deep inside all of that precision and ambition, another instinct was quietly gathering force.
Father — a legacy tribute to her dad, Ned S. Rasor, PhD, "Father of Thermionic Conversion".
In late 2009, unexpectedly, Rasor discovered another side of herself and a new love — sculpture. Not through dramatic reinvention or some lifelong artistic dream, but through taking a class.
The three figures... Hot knife, polystyrene, and Julia S Rasor. They give the appearance of marble or plaster, yet they're entirely recycled: found, sculpted, and sealed. (Sculpture Three Women)
Figures in motion. Fashion models striding down a runway. Cast in Bronze. (Sculpture Avant-Garde Catwalk)
LEARNING TO LET THE MATERIAL LEAD
She describes that suddenly there was another language available to her. Artistic creativity. Science had offered logic, invention, structure. Sculpture offered another side of creation entirely.
Sculpting figures in clay, creating representational forms, learning proportion, movement and material manipulation. Her mentors warned her: abstraction comes later. First repetition. Fifty sculptures, perhaps more. So she worked harder and harder. Sculpting day & night... Somewhere in that process something shifted. Once abstraction arrived, her creative floodgates opened and everything expanded rapidly.
What’s striking is that even after years spent inventing medical devices and working with technologies designed to improve human lives, she never moved away from the human body. Instead she returned to it.
She sculpts people. People remain at the forefront of her mind. People, moments and materials are constantly at the forefront of her mind…
Julia in her Studio, surrounded by art-ribbons, awards for her scientific achievement and old family photos. This is her in her flow zone. (Bronze sculpture Modernism Vibe)
(Bronze sculptures Dressed to Kill and Water Spirit and 3D polymer miniature of one figure in the sculpture Three Women.)
The twins, similar yet entirely different. (Sculpture 236 mixed media original and bronze casting)
Her process became experimental. Clay gave way to steel mesh. Plaster. Rusted and Found materials. Fabric. Cement. Cardboard. Anything she could get her hands on, describing it as an addiction.
One of her favourite materials became polystyrene — lightweight and expressive. She shapes with a hot knife — sealing the edges, almost drawing with a knife... She creates volumes with it, coats it, and eventually transforms them into bronze. Other works are scanned and reproduced in other sizes through 3D printing.
Julia, surrounded by her sculptures, each one a quiet study in what it means to be human. Wonder and awe, captured in form. (Sculptures Avant-Garde - Just the Right Amount of Wrong, Sculpture 238, Triangulate, Julia with Fortitude sculpture)
Nothing appears fixed. Each material changes the sculpture and each sculpture changes with the material. For Rasor, making seems less about arriving at a final object and more about staying in conversation with creation itself.
A LIFE OF MAKING
What stayed with me most after speaking to Julia wasn't any single invention or sculpture.
Elegance & Detail. Carved, sculpted & patinated. (sculpture Tribute to Vogue)
An early representational sculpture Serene.
Rasor was inspired by archival couture shows. Here models Pat Cleveland and Chris Royer pose in the Slink evening dress from Halston's fall 1981 made to order collection. John Bright/WWD
3 more fashion inspired pieces. (series of Haute-Couture sculptures)
It was her energy. That excitement still feels completely intact. She moves from laboratories to studios, from medical devices to sculpture, from science to writing, without treating any of it as contradiction.
There is something deeply moving about meeting someone who has remained curious. You can feel that she genuinely loves learning. She loves making. She loves discovering... A true Adventurer in the Artist field moving from inventions to sculpture and writing... Nothing is out of her realm and it is that process of adventure, creation and learning that peaks her interest most. She is a woman of passion, the closest thing to Leonardo da Vinci in this modern age. Finding herself within the process of learning... How truly beautiful.
Perhaps that comes from the world she grew up in - surrounded by invention and possibility - or perhaps it's simply who she is.
A family united by adventure, learning, and a love of each other. (The Rasors)
Ned S Rasor and Julia S Rasor, 6 months old. An inventor's spark passing from Father to Daughter.
Artwork Credits:
Julia S Rasor Archive : John Bright/WWD : Curiat Editorial Archive
