One to rot and one to grow | Julia Robinson
One to rot and one to grow, a focus presentation on South Australian artist Julia Robinson, who has rapidly developed a national and international profile in recent years with Robinson exhibiting widely across Australia in artist run, publicly funded and commercial spaces.
Robinson’s practice focuses on the historical understandings and contexts of narratives that have revolved around a preoccupation with the finality of death and the human response to this inevitability. Her sculpture and installation stems from an enduring interest in various human responses to death, encompassing fear, religion and ritual, drawing inspiration from a multitude of sources including myths, legends, poems, the Bible, European and Scandinavian folklore, texts such as Dante’s Inferno and films such Häxan: Witchcraft through the ages.
For this project Robinson examines an interest in words and rituals that break the cycle of death and suggest the possibility of resurrection. Importantly, these concerns eschew any particular religious alignment but rather draw on a multiplicity of sources with shared systems of belief. Robinson takes visual and material cues from the peculiarities of the various costumes and rituals and draw on collective ideas around representing death and resurrection. Through her investigations Robinson’s strong figurative element of her practice starts to break down and whatever animal or human presence remains becomes dissolved, disguised or disintegrated.
