Julia Robinson

We’re delighted that Julia Robinson is featured in the new publication ‘Textiles x Art’, written by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, published by Thames and Hudson.

Textile art has surged into the spotlight, shedding its long-standing association with domesticity and craft to take centre stage in galleries, biennales and critical discourse. Authors Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson explore this vibrant resurgence, and the way artists across the globe are embracing traditional techniques like weaving, embroidery, quilting and dyeing, while pushing them into bold new territory. Far from decorative or nostalgic, these works speak to urgent contemporary themes: identity, gender, migration and environment.

This global survey of forty-four artists reveals the shifting boundaries between craft and fine art, and the expressive power of cloth in the hands of today's most boundary-pushing creatives. Textile art isn't just having a moment, it's reshaping the conversation.

Pictured: Textile x Art by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, 2025, Thames and Hudson. Image courtesy of Thames and Hudson

Julia Robinson’s solo exhibition ‘Split by the Spade’ and publication launches on 30^th July at Adelaide Central Gallery. 

Julia Robinson’s ambitious new installation ‘Split by the Spade’ is the latest entry in her ongoing series of odes to the folk horror genre. This exhibition promises to be a finely crafted, immersive experience by Robinson, highly esteemed graduate and staff member of Adelaide Central School of Art and the 2024 SALA feature artist.

Since 2003, Julia Robinson's textile-focused sculpture and installation practice has ruminated on enduring human narratives around sacrifice, sex, and death. Living and working on Kaurna land in Adelaide, South Australia but drawing on the folkloric and, importantly, folk horror traditions of her British ancestry, Robinson conflates humour and horror in ever more unexpected ways. In this, the first major publication dedicated to Robinson's practice, curator Leigh Robb, novelist and poet Hannah Kent, and visual artist Jess Taylor examine her work through their respective lenses and weave together the visual art, literature, folklore, and film most influential to Robinson's practice. The essays and poems contained within are accompanied by reproductions of key works in stunning detail which reveal the artist's keen understanding of historical costuming and sewing techniques. This monograph surveys over twenty years of a prolific and wildly imaginative visual art practice, that combines exceptional technical skill, fantastical invention and thoroughly researched cultural touchstones.

‘Split by the Spade’ will be on display at Adelaide Central Gallery from 30 July to 6 September as part of the 2024 SALA Festival.

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.
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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.

Read the full essay here.

Exhibition runs until June 23.