JULIA Coash arrived in Bermuda only three years ago. In that short time, however, she has become an established and well-respected member of Bermuda's growing arts community.

A teacher of studio art and art history at the Bermuda College, her talents as a painter and photographer are well known through her exhibits in Paris, Cairo, Egypt, the United States, and of course, Bermuda.

This week, photographer ARTHUR BEAN and reporter HEATHER WOOD sat down with Mrs. Coash to discuss her love of art, childhood experiences and why she refuses to take centre stage in any of her husband's theatre productions.

Q: What did you study in college - painting or photography?

A: My undergraduate degree was in ethnographic photography, which (in my case, involved) using photography as a research tool to document the arts of other cultures. I sort of wanted to be Ms National Geographic meets Margaret Meed.

Q: That's a pretty unique field. Where did that interest stem from?

A: I travelled a lot when I was younger. My father was a physician and did lots of volunteer work on the Hope ship - a hospital ship which travels around the world. It teaches doctors in developing countries how to improve their skills and he would operate for free on the local population as they needed it. That was how I started I guess in the very early '60s.

Q: What were some of the countries you'd visit?

A: We would usually go to Latin American countries. (Because of that) my father encouraged us to learn the language. We could only speak Spanish at the dinner table. My father would give us all flash cards. It was kind of a game.

So we learned Spanish and then he took us to Nicaragua and Ecuador. Today, my Spanish is a little rusty, but given the chance to be in a Spanish-speaking country I think it would come back to me. I certainly can understand it but right now, since I speak some Arabic and Portuguese, it all becomes kind of a jumble. It all made me really interested in travelling.

Q: You speak Arabic and Portuguese?

A: I spent three months in Brazil and Portuguese was so easy to pick up after the Spanish. And I took a six-week intensive course (which helped). And the Arabic I learned just from living in Egypt. I was teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt for four years. I pick up languages easily but Arabic is very difficult. I took classes as well but I call (mine) taxi driver Arabic.

Q: Did your incorporate your love of travelling into your university experience?

A: I'm originally from Louisville, Kentucky. I graduated from high school early, and my parents gave me the gift of a year of travelling in South America. It was really after that experience that I decided I wanted to design (my own major).

The only university that I found in the United States that would let me do that was Southern Illinois University as part of a President's Degree programme. If you wrote your own major and they saw it as being a valid proposal, you got to design the courses you would take that were outside of any traditional major. I took photography, cultural anthropology and foreign languages and some linguistics.

Q: And that enabled you to travel?

A: I did one independent research project as part of that programme. I knew of a village in Bolivia that had incredible textiles that had never been documented. So I went back to South America and lived there and documented the textile production techniques and how the textiles were used among the Indians in the area.

I did that when I was a sophmore in college. I returned to college and then got kind of antsy to travel again and do another project. So I did another one in Santa Fe, New Mexico on the Navajo reservation, documenting textiles there but also Anglo-Spanish and Hopi influences on Navajo weaving. Both of those projects culminated in museum exhibitions of photography and textiles.

Q: And then you switched to painting?

A: Towards the end of my undergraduate career, I started taking Fine Arts photography courses. I (began) drawing and painting on my photographs and really doing not documentary photography, but fine arts photography which gradually led me to become a painter.

And then I went on to get my first Master's, in Higher Education, with a teaching concentration in art, and then to get a Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing.

Q: Your work - alongside that of your creative partner, Phillip Jones - was on display at the Bermuda National Gallery as part of its winter exhibit. How did the body of work, Coash & Jones: Collaborative Photography, come about?

A: Really what I've been focusing on since I've been here, and for the last 15 years of my life, is my painting more than the photography. The photography is something I had sort of put on the back burner. (I used to live in) Charlottesville, Virginia.

We were both painters and had similar backgrounds in that we both drew and had backgrounds in set design and photography. So we just got along really well and talked about ideas all the time. My husband Tom, Phil and I used to go to auctions and flea markets together all the time and collect very strange things.

It was kind of just a fluke that just as he and his wife were getting ready to leave town and were having a yard sale, we started fiddling with all of his stuff and decided to photograph some of it; to do a little still life. That was really how the project began; the work at the Bermuda National Gallery, back in 1993.

It set us off on this path of creation and communication about this idea. We would work on them for about two weeks every couple of years. Even when I was in Egypt (the university) was very generous with their grants; in summer, for example, they gave me money to fly back and work on the project.

Q: And how did it become part of the gallery's winter exhibit?

A: I just showed them the work. (Curator) David Mitchell and (director) Laura Gorham had been very interested in creating a section of the National Gallery that was devoted to really new work; the type of work that people on the island hadn't seen before.

It's a way to not show all traditional Bermudian work but to bring in some new ideas in as well. And they just used that work as a starting point for that.

Q: Did the thought of moving to a place as tiny and isolated as Bermuda unnerve you? Did you know much about the island?

A: I had never been to Bermuda before. In terms of any kind of island life, I'd spent a lot of time in the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands and places like that but I didn't know anything about Bermuda. The saving grace in Bermuda is that it's so multicultural even though it's small. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover it had such a huge arts community.

Q: In addition to the work you've displayed as part of the 2002 Bacardi Biennial at the Bermuda National Gallery, and your Collaborative exhibit at the gallery, you've shown frequently since you moved to the island. Does it get easier every time?

A: My show with Emma Mitchell, now on at the Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard, is my third there, I believe, as a featured artist. There's always a certain amount of anxiety before an exhibition and then there's the relief after it's over.

The hardest thing about being an artist, I think, is that you're plagued by self-doubt to some extent. There's the wonder of the world that inspires you to create, but then there's the moments of self- doubt.

Q: I understand the environment plays a big part in your creations?

A: The wonderful part is that I just use found objects from my environment. If you go and see the show at Dockyard, most of the paintings are based on just a little rose petal. But they're very abstract; they're blown up to a kind of level of abstraction.

Q: And you use that technique in all your work?

A: The main link between (the exhibit at the National Gallery and the exhibit at Dockyard), and I think this is important, is that I am using the inspiration of objects found in my little surroundings. Whether it's scraps of metal on the ground or dried leaves or fallen rose petals - that really is the main inspiration.

I think it's a matter of just trying to make my most mundane activities part of my artistic process. In other words, if I'm walking down the street or walking to class; if I'm looking around at scratches on the sidewalk, or at a curled-up piece of grass or a leaf, that can inspire me. It's a way of making a connection between my art and the physical world around me.

Q: We talked about your travels. Is there anywhere in the world that you haven't visited that you would love to see?

A: Since we've moved to Bermuda, most of our trips are back to the United States to visit family but I'd love to go to South East Asia. I've been really interested in Chinese art my whole life. My grandmother had quite a few pieces of both Chinese and Japanese so I'd love to go to, I guess, all of Asia if I could.

Q: How large a family do you have? Are any of them artistic?

A: There are five children in the family. We're all creative. We all have different aspects of my parents. My younger sister is in historic preservation, so her background is art history, basically. My other sister's a teacher. My oldest brother is a plastic surgeon like my father was and still goes to South America every September and does his volunteer work, which is pretty great.

My other brother is a marine surveyor and builds his own boats. My father, in his spare time, used to build boats as a hobby. He would buy the burned out hulls of boats - houseboats on the river - really cheap from insurance companies and build boats.

That's what I remember from when I was a kid; playing in the ditch while he was welding and stuff like that.

Q: And what did you inherit?

A: Well, I've always wanted to try and build a boat. One of my friends is building a beautiful boat on the island and I think (it's because it reminds me of my father) that I enjoy watching the progress of his so much. But my father taught and, interestingly enough, also did set design and painted. My mother's a weaver so that (covers my interest) in textiles.

My grandmother, my father's mother, was also a big traveller. It was interesting. My grandfather didn't like to travel very much so my grandmother would just take off on her own and go wherever. She'd go on ships and stay in the YWCA; she really travelled the world. And she spoke several languages.

Q: Your husband Tom is quite artistic as well, most recently having produced the Famous for 15 Minutes Festival for aspiring playwrights at Daylesford Theatre. Do you ever get involved in his line of art?

A: I act enough when I'm teaching art history class, but I'm pretty shy. In fact, the idea of being on stage kind of terrifies me. I have been in films, but that was sort of a fluke.

In Egypt, it was kind of funny, I taught in a department of performing and visual arts so whenever film crews from National Geographic or HBO or Showtime, whenever they were doing films based in Egypt, they would always come to our department and look for extras. And so I was in an Imax film and some others, but there was nothing frightening about it; no acting.

Q: And so, outside of art and travel, you entertain yourself how?

A: My mother was a great tennis player but (as a child) I was never interested at all. I've started playing tennis and I enjoy snorkelling. I love to cook. I'm a big experimenter. I don't go by the recipe and sometimes (that's my pitfall). I can't remember what I've made.