For Bradley, that moment came on a recent trip to Cornwall, a part of England she had yet to see. Specifically, she wanted to learn more about the mythology and legend that peppers the local history. But while there, she found herself visiting the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St Ives – the preserved home and studio space of the 20th century sculptor, who died in 1975.

"She's a massively famous person, but I hadn't really been passionate about her or her work," Bradley says.

But the visit became something of a revelation, both of the woman herself, and for Bradley's own work. Until now, Barbara Hepworth had been a towering but distant figure in the international art scene, studied at art school, the name bandied about as one of a movement or an era. But, standing in her house, seeing the rooms in which she created her monumental works, Bradley suddenly saw Hepworth in full focus.

Later, while reading Hepworth's letters and biography, she discovered that the artist's achievements were all the more extraordinary, given the man's world in which she was working, and the fact that she had four children – three of them triplets – in the process.

"I think she was successful, which helped. I think she made enough money to keep herself going, but her passion, her driven nature was the thing that really got me," Bradley says.

"When she talks about her work, her process, she never waivers, she's a confident woman artist. She doesn't like being called a woman, she didn't take on the feminist iconography. She chose to be an artist, she didn't want to be described by her gender, and I appreciated that, at a time when women's art was becoming very important."

But Bradley says it's hard to deny your gender when you make work – it's there whether you like it or not.

"One of the things that I have been very influenced by in my practice are other woman artists, particularly women who not have had the limelight. When I read her story, I thought, this is magnificent, this woman is a magnificent artist. I'd like to somehow enter into a conversation or have some sort of ideas around her."

When Bradley returned to Canberra, she went to her studio at M16 Artspace, and immediately made six artworks that, by her own account, "just popped out of nowhere".

"They're very different from the work I've been making up until now, and I just let myself make them, I did them as an homage to [Hepworth], and I did them to look at playing with some of her ideas about shapes, about stones," she says.

"What influenced my work was the way that she approached seeing things. It was around about the time when abstraction was really kicking, as it is now, and I think people were starting to move away from very straightforward representations of the world, and she was looking for a different way of speaking."

Until this visit, Bradley says, her work was figurative. But her most recent works lean more towards the abstract. Although they are compositions that reference Hepworth's lavish garden, the lines that reference the garden recede and become structural, or disappear altogether.

She has plans now for a new series of works in homage to female artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Judy Chicago. But her current work is focused on the symbolism of stones. Like all her works, this one will have the underlying premise of interconnection. And, in the context of her rest of her work, it still connects to the past. Bradley doesn't look upon her old works dubiously, but rather as steps on a journey.

"As artists, we're not fixed in a point of time. We change," she says.

"I've been working as an artist for 35 years, and I would be surprised if my work didn't change, and I think it's good not to be frightened of innovation as an artist. I also think there's a lot of pressure put on artists to commodify what they do and be known for a particular thing. So I don't see it as anything except the natural progression of ideas ... here I was doing this – the techniques are still the same, and the interests are still the same – composition, communication, storytelling, that sort of stuff. The way the work looks has changed."

And things are happening in her career. She has been selected as a finalist in four different almost simultaneous prizes, astounding when one considers that the process of entering art prizes is, for most artists at least, akin to entering the lottery.

"It depends on the judge, it depends on what other works are in there, it depends on who else has applied, there's a lot of variables that you can't control, so if you go in thinking, 'I should get into this', that's probably the wrong attitude because it just doesn't always work that way," she says.

"But it's not just the competitions, it's a lot of other things, meaning there's a sense of feeling right. I don't know how else to explain that. It's an intuitive thing, that this seems the right thing to be making, and production-wise, I just want to keep making them."

It's a gratifying experience, given that Bradley has only been a full-time professional artist for six years. Before that, she taught extensively, at the ANU School of Art, CIT and, most recently, in the design faculty at the University of Canberra. "You name it, I've taught it," she says.

Originally from Sydney, she moved to Canberra in the 1970s to study at the School of Art and, like many of her particular generation, stayed on the help forge what became a bold new art scene here, one built on collectives and shared opportunity.

"One of the wonderful things about graduating when I did was the Whitlam money was still kicking in Canberra, it was a good place to be, there were enough of us working in a collective manner, we weren't so much individualists at the time, people were prepared to work together," she says.

"Studios like Studio One were set up, PhotoAccess, Megalo Screen and Print workshop was just starting. These workshops didn't exist before we graduated in '81. So it was a perfect time for people to invest in staying in Canberra."

As a printmaker, as she then was, she wouldn't have been able to remain if Studio One, a distant cousin to what is now M16 Artspace, had not been established.

In the interim, she married and had a child – a daughter who is now the well-known sculptor Jacqueline Bradley – and found herself accepting any teaching jobs that came along.

"I taught drawing, fashion illustration, botanical drawing, portraiture, the whole lot, and that comes from being a mum, because I didn't have a full time job, so consequently if anyone offered me a job I would say yes and I would do it," she says.

And we're back to Hepworth again – the sculptor and her triplets. Bradley can't help wondering how her own daughter – a rising star in the art world – will negotiate her own family transitions.

In the meantime, her own works, she says, are almost forming on the page before her eyes – not without physical or mental effort, but in way she finds entirely, well, pleasant. And it's partly down to Hepworth's legacy.

"It's a really great way to work, and it just seems to be the right way forward," she says.

"I think also, I'm getting feedback from other people, and interestingly when I'm putting this work out, the response from other people has been quite excited. So I don't know what that is, and you know, it's such a nebulous thing, what makes people enjoy a particular aesthetic. I also think there's a lot of ether."

It's something that she and many artists have often picked up on – the impression of a zeitgeist forming outside anyone's physical control.

"As an artist, you can be working like I do, in a studio, where you think you're not at all connected to anyone else, and you walk out and see three people who are working the same way as you. So what is going on there?" she says.

"Somehow everybody's tapped into something – perhaps it's sub-consciously, perhaps not, perhaps it's just what people's interests are. You do take in information without being conscious of it sometimes. I think you're just scanning all the time."

Julie Bradley's next exhibition will be at Form Studio and Gallery in Queanbeyan in November.