Postal Address: PO Box 8067, Station Arcade SA 5000
Tel: (08) 8410 1822 Fax: (08) 8231 0004 Email: craftsouth@craftsouth.org.au
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Address: 1st Floor, JamFactory Building, 19 Morphett Street, Adelaide Postal Address: PO Box 8067, Station Arcade SA 5000 Tel: (08) 8410 1822 Fax: (08) 8231 0004 Email: craftsouth@craftsouth.org.au |
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Craftsouth is pleased to promote its membership of craft, design and visual art practitioners through this series of Member Profiles.
To compare Julia Robinson’s artistic practice with that of her Infernal Cake, shown in November 2007 at The Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), could be fraught with danger. Robinson’s towering and gruesomely embroidered white cake, is after all, an inversion of Dante’s description of the levels of hell in Inferno. Nevertheless, the upright tiers bear similarity to Robinson’s practice in that, step by step, she has been building upon her experiences to clamber up to a higher level, away from the hellish underworld she so lovingly and often depicts. Early in her artistic career (around 2002), Robinson was enamoured with concepts of girlish fantasy and fairy tales. This took a sharp turn when venturing upon her first solo exhibition at The Project Space, titled Eat Wolf (2004). Here the niceties were literally engulfed by one of the baddies of the fairy tale world (Little Red Riding Hood’s sinister wolf) and spat back out again in the form of bloodied and stitched innards and engorged bellies. Since that time Robinson has continued her obsession with the beauty of gruesomeness. She has visually translated poetic and disturbing phrasing from Dante, the myth of Lycaon, medieval transcripts, and satanic writings; creating objects of art that, despite depicting blood and guts, are meticulously and laboriously made into ‘nice’ things. Robinson uses an array of materials in her work, including ceramic painting, fibreglass, toile de jouy fabric and wire, as well as dabbling regularly in embroidery and stitch. She enjoys the immediacy of a very literal hands-on approach (the distance of a brush being too far) and connects with her depicted victims in the process of making as she is similarly stabbed, poked and burnt. Her involvement in local group exhibitions, in particular Further Doings at downtown artspace, Adelaide (2003), and Sensible Shoes (2006) at Adelaide Central Gallery, as well as her solo exhibition Howling Around Your Kitchen Door (2005) at Adelaide Central Studio Gallery, have created opportunities for Robinson that have lead to richer bodies of work. Thus we have seen Robinson’s practice develop over the last five years of ‘emergence’ into a more established form. In recent times Robinson has embarked upon more ambitious feats and will continue to do so for her forthcoming exhibition at Über, Melbourne, in 2008. Her association with Über began in early 2007 –and here we come full circle – with the first showing of her monumental Infernal Cake. After much time in planning, this artwork took over four months full-time to stitch and assemble, but is a sign of the direction Robinson would like her practice to continue - toward ambitious larger projects. As well as pursuing her own arts practice from her Adelaide-based studio, twinBEE studios, where she has been a mainstay, Robinson also teaches at Adelaide Central School of Art. Teaching she says, keeps her ’on the pointy end of things’ and up-to-date with contemporary practices. Whether it be through research, the use of piercing needles, life-size installations of speared fawn, or a sharp employment of visual wit, Robinson’s practice can be seen to reside at the scintillating ‘pointy end’ of local art.
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