Julia Robinson, Hugo Michell Gallery, 12 Mar to 11 Apr 2026
Retrospective reflections on recent works of a confirmed logophile
The following is a retrospective review of Julia Robinson’s recent solo exhibition, The Felling Place, which closed in mid-April.
From Greek mythology and Francois Rabelais to Hieronymus Bosch and Edgar Alan Poe, the ever-expanding, literary, art-historical and cinematic references that inform Julia Robinson’s ambitious artworks are thorou ghly researched and impeccably realised.
The source material may at times be well known, but her highly original, sculptural interpretations are emphatically her own. Yet, beyond a search for generative references, she is also a visual artist with a manifestly deep appreciation for words and language. In the context of her most recent exhibition, The Felling Place, it is entertaining to learn that logophile (derived from the Greek logos, ‘word’) is the expression for such a person.
Unusually, Robinson’s 2024 SALA monograph is interspersed—and further enriched—with a succession of visceral poems and texts by renowned author, Hannah Kent. And it was a folk-horror novel, Starve Acre (2019)—by multi-award-winning British author Andrew Michael Hurley—that propelled Robinson’s 2024 solo exhibition Split by the Spade. In a felicitous development, Hurley has contributed an evocative text for her most recent exhibition, The Felling Place.
Chronicled in an epic, fourteenth-century alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ,the impetus for The Felling Place is a potentially lethal, chivalric confrontation involving a confounding ‘beheading game’. T his Arthurian saga was most recently adapted for the screen in David Lowery’s haunting 2021 film,The Green Knight. As Robinson explains in her artist statement:
“The Felling Place is a foray into eco-horror and plant horror: sub-genres that arise from our fractured relationship with the natural world and might be characterised by narratives where nature is not only sentient, but malevolent … My work conflates the motif of beheading with tree felling, drawing attention to both the absent (human) head and the absent canopy of the tree.”
Woundwood (detail), 2025, 100 x 107 x 12cm (irregular) axes, jacquard, silk, thread, felt, interfacing, steel, magnets. Photo: Sam Roberts, courtesy of Hugo Michell Gallery
Hurley’s illuminating exhibition text is lent immediacy by a visit to Lud’s Church, a narrow ravine in England’s Peak District, created by a landslide some 300 million years ago and notable for its historical/mythological associations (the Lollards and Robin Hood, to cite two examples). Significantly, for this context, scholars consider the site may be the ‘Green Chapel’—the location of the medieval poem’s fraught encounter between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hurley’s affecting description details the soaring, moss and lichen-encrusted gritstone walls of the perpetually shaded, 100-metre chasm, making note of lingering human detritus, like a rotting glove and an old boot half-buried in the sludge. It is a cheerless plac.
“[E]very fissure in the rock blooms with hart’s tongue or spleenwort; hardy ferns that thrive in these dark, dank clefts. It’s too closed-in here for echoes and so there is almost silence apart from the drip of water. It’s hard not to feel conspicuous. In fact, it’s hard not to think of the place as a lair.”
In Robinson’s adaptation, the Green Knight is the “personification of a vengeful nature come to challenge the warmongering humans with an axe – their preferred weapon of choice for ecocide.” At Hugo Michell Gallery, a series of eleven wall-hung, textile works, in which the centrepiece, Woundwood, is a pair of crossed axes, appropriately occupied the gallery’s darker, more contained rear space. For each of ten textile-swaddled, copper-plated logs—eerily selected to mirror the dimensions of a human neck—she has borrowed the form and botanical terminology of various formations or mutations that occur in nature. Apparently suggestive, Lateral-crotch, for example, is a horticultural term for the variable points of connection between branches and the trunk of a tree. Premature, unhealthy new growth, which is prone to breakage, is known as a Buckling-shoot. And the more sinister Girdling-root refers to an aberrant form of growth, where wayward roots encircle a trunk, ultimately throttling the host tree, by obstructing the flow of essential water and nutrients.
Girdling-root, 2025, 55 x 140 x 14 cm (irregular) copper-plated log, jacquard, silk, thread, felt, interfacing, steel, magnets. Photo: Sam Roberts, courtesy of Hugo Michell Gallery.
The polished gleam of the copper-plated logs is unexpected, although Robinson has introduced glossy metallic elements in the past (like the golden spikes that pierced her suite of works for The National 2019). More pertinently, she has always been drawn to transitory states, to the potential for metamorphosis; and over time, the brightness of copper will undergo a greening through oxidisation – morphing to the protective powderiness of verdigris. (As viewers will have observed, her hybrid-preoccupation extends to an inspired merging of literary and cinematic references that traverses time periods and locations.)
In The Felling Place, Robinson’s copper-plated logs appeared not so much cocooned, as constrained by a characteristically inventive array of textile ‘collars’ fashioned from textured green jacquard bound with narrow bias strips of green silk. It’s relevant to point out that the use of these opulent fabrics is entirely congruent with the noble status of Sir Gawain, who is King Arthur’s nephew. The original fourteenth-century poem contains detailed descriptions of the lavish sartorial preparations for Gawain’s odyssey, which include the positioning of multiple pieces of armour (hauberk, cuisses, greaves etc.), some of which are fastened with “knots of gold”
The strong man steps there and handles the steel/ dressed in a doublet of silk of Turkestan/ and then a well-crafted cape, clasped at the top/ that with a white ermine was trimmed within. 1.
Crown-lop, 2025, 40 x 35 x 18cm, copper-plated log, jacquard, silk, thread, felt, interfacing, steel, magnets. Photo: Sam Roberts, courtesy of Hugo Michell Gallery
Given Robinson’s passion for reading, it’s instructive to consider her effective use of language as a means of insinuating a sense of foreboding: titles of exhibitions and individual artworks are frequently freighted with intimations of threat, or at least unease – sometimes in unexpected tandem with sexual innuendo. Her vocabulary tends to favour monosyllabic or succinct language – often with roots in Old English/Norse – that achieves maximum impact through the use of short, sharp words, such as Twitch, Folk death, The Pledge, Pinch wood or Deadhead (untitled works are rare). Split by the Spade, based on Hurley’s – equally pithy – Starve Acre is a prime example. Interestingly, the expression ‘split by the spade’ appears in Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney’s moving four-part poem ‘At a Potato Digging’ (1966) – a thematically apposite point of reference. The Felling Place similarly strikes an ominous tone – and a further layer of local significance, given the projected felling of hundreds of Adelaide’s park land trees.
Moreover, certain series resonate with a tension between the unwavering perfection of the stitchery and the probable imminence of its destruction – posed by the presence of a variety of sharp objects, including scythes, sickles, spikes and axes. It’s a threat memorably realised in Robinson’s outstanding 2022 exhibition The Beckoning Blade – inspired by Robin Hardy’s 1973 film The Wicker Man – featuring a smockfest of exquisite linen garments, disturbingly penetrated with scythes or skewered by multi-pronged farming implements.
The disconcerting presence of a weathered, sharply bladed axe in an earlier artwork – in which three disembodied, soft-sculpture arms clutch the handle of a metal axe – generated a truly unsettling air of menace. Bloody deeds was part of an unnerving suite of Robinson’s Poe-inspired sculptures for the Gothic exhibition, Imagining Interiors (2011).2 By contrast, the blades of The Felling Place’s crossed axes are symbolically merged and (mostly) neutralised; a recognition that Gawain has been spared a fatal blow in the bizarre ‘beheading game’ (although for Lowery, Gawain’s survival is synonymous with a demeaning loss of knightly honour). A sense of foreboding therefore resides in The Felling Place’s neck-sized (headless) copper-plated logs, where shaped textile ‘collars’ are “suggestive of roots, tendrils, leaves, and oozing or spurting blood.”
With each (anticipated) new series or installation, Robinson elects to work within fluctuating registers of the macabre, drollery, bawdiness, scale and so on. In one of her distinguishing strategies, a seductive strand of humour – from the droll to the patently absurd – threads its way throughout her body of work. Who can forget the hybrid, shoe-wearing deer/human with an unexpected ‘hide’ of toile de Jouy fabric; a lone, vastly overscaled (soft-sculpture) molar, inexplicably occupying a chair, or the rampantly suggestive – to overtly phallic – array of gourds, preposterously kitted out in elaborately worked silks? Recently, Robinson posted on Instagram an amusingly performative image of herself, adopting a log-cradling pose that defined the notorious Log Lady character from David Lynch’s cult television series Twin Peaks (1990).
Julia Robinson as Twin Peaks’ Log Lady, 2026, (@juliarobinsonart)
Photo: Roy Ananda
Over the course of more than twenty years of her textile-based practice, she has developed a knack for tackling universal themes by burrowing into predominantly historical narratives that veer towards the macabre. “The best stories in life”, she has stated, “are about sex, death and rebirth and for me this is why folklore always feels so relevant.” Writing in Artlink in 2024, Belinda Howden likened Robinson’s output to chapters of an anthology, or the scripting of cinematic sequences, “where grand themes of patriarchy and power, class antagonisms, the perils of superstition, and the cautionary tales of groupthink or religious indoctrination are materialised.”
On reflection, it is possible to view three solo exhibitions of the 2020s – The Beckoning Blade (2022), Split by the Spade (2024) and The Felling Place (2026) – as a highly resolved trilogy of folk and eco-horror, conceptually discrete, yet specifically underpinned by the darker potentialities of Anglo-Celtic narratives (reflecting her family’s British heritage). In The Felling Place, she casts nature as not only resilient, but vengeful, epitomised by the Green Knight, who has the capacity to reattach his severed head – a resilience that signifies nature’s endurance as part of “a cycle of growth, death, and regrowth”. Typically couched within a unique framework, Robinson says this exhibition is the closest she has come to making work directly about her environmental concerns. At a time of mounting crises (some of which are all too close to home), she believes that “humans must face up to their frailty in the face of ecological disaster.”
Serrated-margin, 2025, copper-plated log, jacquard, silk, thread, felt, interfacing, steel, magnets, 117 x 50 x 15 cm. Photo Sam Roberts, courtesy of Hugo Michell Gallery
Finally, as we contemplate a winter of discontent, a return to Andrew Michael Hurley’s exhibition text may offer some perspective, if not reassurance. For Hurley, standing in the deep time of Lud’s Church in March this year, “everything seem[ed] wintry with the world.” However, on hearing the diverting warble of the first skylark of spring, he is moved to conclude his essay on a poetically hopeful note.
And so, the (ever) Green Chapel is a site of death and rebirth. It is both wound and womb, grave and grove. Nature is humankind’s enduring allegory of hope. In it, we see transformations not endings.
Wendy Walker
1. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, anon., trans. A. S. Kline.
2. I was the curator of the 2011 group exhibition, Imagining Interiors, with works by twelve contemporary artists based on Gothic literature.
When: 10 Mar to 11 April
Where: Hugo Michell Gallery
More info: hugomichellgallery.com
See Hannah Kent’s ‘Bloody deeds’ and the eponymous image in: Leigh Robb, Hannah Kent, Jess Taylor, Julia Robinson, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2024, pps. 88-91
Seamus Heaney’s ‘At a Potato Digging’ is part of the Death of a Naturalist (1966) collection of poetry.
