Julia spent most of her career working in the humanitarian aid world, mainly in Africa and with refugees in the UK. The stresses of this work led to her moving back to Scotland five years ago and in deciding it was time for a change. Her mother was an artist and her childhood home was filled with  junk shop and auction finds, including lots of Staffordshire pottery. She had always been interested in ceramics and after moving to North Berwick was finally able to set up her small studio -  Oranmore Pottery.

Julia loves making highly decorated pieces and sees the clay as a surface to do that.  Her work is very folk art influenced, which comes from her Czech heritage and elements of her time spent in Africa also emerging.

Julia specialises in wheel-thrown and hand built unique earthenware functional and decorative items.

Julia very often creates her designs using Sgraffito (in Italian "to scratch"). This is a technique to decorate pottery by applying layers of colour or colours (underglazes or coloured slips) to leather hard pottery and then scratching off parts of the layer(s) to create contrasting images, patterns and texture and reveal the clay colour underneath. The layer(s) of colour can be underglazes or colored slips.