Julia Robinson
‘Eerie Pageantry’ is a cornucopia of folk horror and art played out through a ritualistic meeting of made and modified materials, textures, colours, tools, bodies and nightmares. Julia Robinson and Don Driver's assemblages and sculptures form an elaborate ceremonial procession in the gallery space—an eerie pageantry of the Antipodean Gothic.
‘Eerie Pageantry’ is curated by Aaron Lister and Dr Chelsea Nichols as part of their project Curator of Screams which explores connections between contemporary art and horror films.
‘Eerie Pageantry’ is on display at City Gallery Wellington (Te Whare Toi), New Zealand, from 28 October to 18 February 2024.
We are thrilled to share that Julia Robinson has been awarded the Absolute Best South Australian Artist Award for SA Life’s ‘Absolute Best Awards’ for 2022.
The awards celebrate the finest in South Australian food, drink, travel and design, as well as the individuals and businesses leading the way in their fields.
Congratulations to all the nominees for this category - Margaret Ambridge and Daryl Austin!
To read more about this year's finalists, pick up a copy of the December issue of SALIFE.
Portrait of Julia Robinson, 2022. Photography by Sam Roberts
Julia Robinson has been announced as exhibiting in the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Monster Theatres.
Presented throughout the Art Gallery of South Australia as well as partner venue Adelaide Botanic Gardens and its Museum of Economic Botany, the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres will be presented from 29 February to 8 June as the key visual art offering of the Adelaide Festival.
Monster Theatres proposes an arena of speculation, a circus of the unorthodox and the absurd, a shadow play between truth and fiction. The title is inspired by a group of provocative Australian artists. Their urgent works of art are warnings made manifest. These theatres are theirs.’
Leigh Robb, Curator, Monster Theatres
Full list of artists:
Abdul Abdullah (NSW) Mike Bianco (WA) Polly Borland (VIC) Michael Candy (QLD) Megan Cope (VIC) Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari (WA) Julian Day (NSW) Karla Dickens (NSW) Mikala Dwyer (VIC) Brent Harris (VIC) Aldo Iacobelli (SA) Pierre Mukeba (SA) David Noonan (VIC) Mike Parr (NSW) Julia Robinson (SA) Yhonnie Scarce (SA/VIC) Garry Stewart and Australian Dance Theatre (SA) Stelarc (VIC) Kynan Tan (NSW) Mark Valenzuela (SA) Willoh S. Weiland (TAS) Judith Wright (QLD)
Julia Robinson is now showing in The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
The National is a celebration of contemporary Australian art. The second of three biennial survey exhibitions, it showcases work being made across the country by artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. Through ambitious new and commissioned projects, the 70 artists featured across three venues respond to the times in which they live, presenting observations that are provocative, political, and poetic. The National is a partnership between the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This year, it has been curated by Isobel Parker Philip (AGNSW), Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Carriageworks), and Clothilde Bullen (MCA), and Anna Davis (MCA). Working in close dialogue, they have developed three distinct presentations of new Australian art that together highlight many of the ideas and concerns motivating artists in Australia today.
Jenna McKenzie has examined the new works in the exhibition:
Cold, dusty skin swells, ballooning outwards from the perfectly round aperture of a gourd. Tongue or tendril, shoot or sprig, a shock of blue-smocked fabric emanates from an amniotic abyss. Coiled and wrapped, clothed and dressed, silks the shade of a tender bruise adorn the fantastical forms of Julia Robinson’s new work. These otherworldly objects emerge from the suspended animation of their wall fittings. An exotic banquet of surfaces is offered to the viewer, ranging from perfectly smooth metals (polished brass, steel, and gold) and intricately smocked, slashed or jack-plated silks, to the raw, untreated surface of the gourds. Together, they mutate, hatch, split and pierce, invoking the transitional state of metamorphosis.
Exploration of transformative states is an intrinsic part of the Adelaide-based artist’s practice. Robinson, who works in the fields of sculpture and installation, has an enduring fascination with sex and death. Drawing on a multitude of sources including myth, superstition, folklore, and calendric celebrations rooted in the changing of the seasons, her work reflects an interest in how humans address existence and mortality through ritual.
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For The National 2019 Robinson returns to this fertility motif – slicing, dressing, piercing, and gold-plating the gourd, traversing the dichotomies of interior and exterior. She describes this new body of work as “a dialogue with Hieronymus Bosch about ritual, growth and fecundity by way of his remarkable painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1504).”
For Robinson, Bosch’s garden is alive with the processes of fertilisation, germination, and ripening. In his hands, the Garden of Eden becomes a site for metamorphoses, redolent with the mutating, hatching, splitting of the plant world.
Exhibition runs until June 23.
Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Julia Robinson to our represented artists!
Julia Robinson is a South Australian visual artist whose work reflects an interest in religion, the afterlife, death, and how humans address these concerns through ritual. Drawing on established belief systems and a multitude of sources including myths, fairy tales, and European superstition and folklore, Robinson examines our discomfort with sex and with the finality of death. Blurring the boundaries that separate the man-made, the natural, and the spiritualistic, Robinson’s impish sculptures and installations surprise and intrigue. Recent works draw on depictions of harvest, fertility, and resurrection rituals in folk horror films, such as The Wicker Man (1973) and Wake Wood (2011).
Julia has exhibited widely across Australia, and has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards. Upcoming exhibitions include The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent exhibitions include: Open House, a touring exhibition and the Tamworth Textile Triennial; Versus Rodin: Bodies across space and time at the Art Gallery of South Australia; Long Ballads at Ideas Platform Artspace; Sensual Nature at the Fremantle Arts Centre; Structure for navigating an unknown afterlife at Art Pod; and Psychache at Holy Rollers Studio. Julia is currently lecturing at Adelaide Central School of Art. Her work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia and Artbank, and in private collections across Australia.