One to rot and one to grow
Julia Robinson’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre continued her hallucinatory work that often uses animal forms to stand as metaphors for humans, while simultaneously possessing their own strange lives. Robinson’s work is intense and engaged with labour, experimentation and the exploration of liminal areas of human experience.
In this ambitious exhibition, laid out as a narrative over the three rooms of the gallery, there was a shift in her making, in that often her crippled and tormented beasts are almost impossibly firmly sewn into their fabric coverings, while this time they were wrinkled and looser-fitting. Thus the work was somehow less crafted and more activated, though still very finely made, referencing women’s highly skilled but faceless and nameless work with textiles over the centuries. There is an echo, too, of the work of Yinka Shonibare, whose headless nineteenth century figures, clad in the archetypal European costumes of their time made up in African wax fabrics, spin and twist with a writhing energy.
Unlike many examples of the taxidermy turn in contemporary art, Robinson does not buy her creatures online or even use blank foam bodies, but has always made them from scratch. This involves drawing from life, modelling in flywire and ultimately, painstakingly covering them in fabric, not fur.
Thus her beasts are never merely imitating life but tapping it like poltergeists, or even children’s toys, which always keep some kind of talismanic quality linking them to talking animals and substitutions that happen in the dark. Often Robinson’s works evoke beings from a still forming nightmare—a half-goat is strapped to a prosthetic chair, two disembodied arms reach out from a bedhead, a giant tooth straddles a chair. These