Launching in tandem with the 2024 SALA Publication, 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. Robinson’s long-standing themes of death, decay and renewal are explored through her signature blend of historical costuming techniques and archaic found objects. This body of work takes inspiration from Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel Starve Acre, a text that is emblematic of folk horror with its bleak narrative and sinister pseudo-folklore that challenges the concept of the rural idyll. Motifs from the novel – a gallows tree, a fallow field, and a burial site – are conjured by the artist to haunt the gallery as a series of textile apparitions.

The project has been supported by Arts South Australia. Julia Robinson is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.