Show notes:

• JuliaRobinson.net
• Hannah Kent
• Leigh Robb – Instagram
• Jess Taylor
• Satanic Panic
• Tilberi – Icelandic Folklore
• The Wicker Man (film, 1973, directed by Robin Hardy)
• The Song of Master John Goodfellow
• gourd (fruit)
• The Gourdfather
• Beatrice in the 2020 Adelaide Biennial at Museum of Economic Botany
• Rappaccini’s Daughter
• Scylla – Greek mythology
• Julia’s monograph at Wakefield Press

Podcast photo by Daniel Marks
Forum photos by Eugene Suleau

Andrew 00:00

To begin with, I would like to acknowledge that the land we meet on today is the traditional land of the Kaurna people, and we pay our respects to Aboriginal elders past, present and emerging.

Thank you all very much for coming here today. I always get a little bit nervous before public speaking, but it’s very reassuring to look out on this crowd and see a lot of friendly faces and people we know, so thank you for coming along for this, the SALA Forum and the Writers’ Panel to celebrate Julia Robinson’s monograph. I’m going to sit down now because otherwise I’ll be standing for quite a while, and I don’t know how to do that seamlessly. That’s going to sound great in the recording! (Audience laughs)

To start with, can you please join me in welcoming our esteemed panel, artist Julia Robinson, this year’s SALA Feature Artist.

(Audience applauds)

Novelist Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites, The Good People, Devotion, and feature film Run, Rabbit, Run, please welcome Hannah.

(Audience applauds)

The Art Gallery of South Australia’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Leigh Robb, Curator of Monster Theatres, a whole host of other wonderful exhibitions.

(Audience applauds)

And highly accomplished artist Jess Taylor, who is also both a graduate and a lecturer here at this school and has a big exhibition coming up later in the year at POP Galleries, The End, and is currently showing at Maitland Regional Gallery. Can we welcome Jess please?

Now, it has been a week of celebrations, a lot of that limelight focused on Julia. On Tuesday night, we opened her absolutely beautiful new solo exhibition, Split by the Spade, here at Adelaide Central Gallery. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it yet, we will keep the gallery open after this talk and you can all wander down and enjoy that show. She also has works displayed throughout the Melrose Wing of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Sculptural Storytelling, a show put together by Leigh that reviews some of Julia’s more historic works, and there are also works on display at Julia’s gallery at Hugo Michel Gallery. So, you’re hard-pressed to miss Julia’s work during the SALA Festival, but I do encourage you to get out and see as much of it as you can.

But today, we’re actually focused on this. This absolutely beautiful volume published by Wakefield Press, written by these three fantastic writers here, and designed by Rachel Harris. This is an absolutely beautiful book. We’ve sold quite a few of them today. For those of you who missed out, don’t worry, we’ve got more coming. We’re more than happy to take your names and get copies to you. We want these in people’s hands. Any copies bought through the school also have… oh, we haven’t stamped that one. Anyone who has a copy and bought it today will see that it has a limited-edition little stamp to mark it as a special one that’s been bought through this institution.

But you’re not here to hear from me, you’re here to hear from these writers and this wonderful artist. So, I’d love to kick off this talk and I’d like to start, Julia, with you. The SALA monograph, I’m not sure everyone understands this. This is something that is applied for, that people go out for. Sometimes institutions approach it, but you yourself sort of led the charge on this book and you were the one behind selecting these writers to create this book. Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to these three women?

Julia 03:28

Yeah, so the SALA publication is an application. So, you can decide, or you can hopefully ask the writers that you’re interested in. And I think from the very early days of very beginning when I thought I might apply for this book and what I’m feeling like I was maybe ready for it and ready to take a shot. These three people just coalesced in my mind, and I was like, ‘can you imagine if I got these three phenomenal female writers and artists and curators, it would be the most amazing dream team?’. So, I reached out to them all and they said yes. And I was kind of like, okay, this is happening. This is amazing.

The reason that I wanted to work with these three people, very different takes on what I wanted them to bring to the book. Start with Hannah on my left. So, I had been a massive, massive fan of Hannah’s writing. We hadn’t actually met until I approached her to ask if she was keen to even think about doing this, but I had been following her work and had been really inspired in my own practice as well by particularly Burial Rites and The Good People, which had preceded the application. And I just felt that Hannah and I shared the same interest. And even though we were manifesting our interests in very different ways through writing or through art, we had that shared kind of interest in concepts of good and evil and the way women have been historically portrayed and treated and depicted. I had done a lot of research into Icelandic folklore, which was very relevant with Hannah, and into general kind of folklore and Irish folklore as well. And I just felt that we were both storytellers that just produce stories in very different ways. And I thought it would be a really beautiful opportunity if I could get Hannah to be engaged with this book that she’ll be able to respond to my kind of themes, but through writing. So that was really lovely.

Leigh and I have worked together on some major projects and some slightly smaller projects for some years, (to Leigh) pretty much since you moved to Adelaide, we became firm friends and colleagues. I have always thought that Leigh has such a kind of incredible passion and dedication and kind of grasp on any artist practice that she works with, and including mine, that the more we kind of worked together, the more I felt that, you know, she would understand my practice and would bring this highly focused and thorough lens to it. So, I think when we talked about this it was kind of like, right, I think it would be wonderful if you could bridge my whole practice or kind of take us through that whole journey and just bring your incredible dedication and your wonderful voice to my work, which is exactly what you’ve done.

And Jess, so it’s funny because Jess and I first knew each other when I taught her as a student at art school, but when you move from a lecturer-student relationship to a peer-colleague-friend relationship you very quickly forget about those early days and it kind of moves into this wonderful period of shared knowledge and companionship and I have always adored and admired Jess’s work. She’s a fiercely intelligent person, she makes amazing works inspired by horror and feminism and while I’m not completely in that zone I definitely stray into it and felt that Jess would be such an appropriate voice writing as an artist, particularly having an artist on this book was really important to me, the maker’s perspective and just being able to bring that incredibly thorough tone to my work and touching particularly as she does in the book on horror, feminism, satanic panic and folk horror which is my current love. So, there’s my rationale and yeah, I mean honestly, dream team.

Andrew 06:54

If anyone wants to more hear about ‘satanic panic’ this is the place.

(Audience laughs)

Thank you, Julia. Reading through this book, it is beautifully laid out and divided up between the three writers, a range of different responses to your work. Leigh, can you tell us a little bit about how the three of you arrived at this structure for the book and what it was like working all together on something like this?

Leigh 07:26

I was just saying before that this is one of those perfect experiences which you often don’t get when you’re working on a book. You don’t often get the time to come together with a concept, how you’re going to do it, who’s going to write, what the approach is, but also to have the time to dig really deep into Julia’s practice and the process of getting to know each other as well. So, it was really special because we’d either come around to my place or to Julia’s place and we’d spend whole afternoons or evenings doing slideshows, going back to Julia’s very early works. And so, it was this very, very generous and shared approach where Julia would talk us through the work so we’d get a sense of what was important, why, and then each of us would have a different reading or different areas of expertise. But at one point Julia wanted it to be an anthology and she created this incredible kind of mind map which kind of looked more like a D&D landscape of themes from satanic panic and folk horror through to metamorphosis and witches and all these different characters and dangerous women and a whole lot of different themes and we’d pick through them in a way in terms of what we wanted to talk about.

It was such a… rigorous but very open process, wasn’t it, to get to where we ended up. But I think being a curator, I couldn’t just write about one thing or another thing. I was like, I want to write about everything from the beginning to the end, in terms of looking at the discrete bodies of work, how the evolution of your incredible idiosyncratic sculptural language, materially, how you’ve used everything from your interest in reskinning and reimagining fairy tales and the role of Wolfrid the wolf and rethinking the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the wolf as well, through to your interest in Icelandic witch trials.

Julia works in an incredibly interesting way because she pursues a topic, there’s loads of working behind the scenes… journals and journals and journals working through an idea both thematically and then materially and that tension is what is present in all of the works and so it was really a joy to get to go through and think through how things have changed materially, chromatically, artistically and this evolution in her practice technically as well so it was really it was a joy to walk through those different discrete bodies of work from your first show at CACSA after graduating from here so… that’s the long answer.

(Laughter)

Andrew 10:14

Alongside your very expansive overview of Julia’s practice, which is quite a remarkable undertaking, Leigh, because it’s a very full 20-year practice, Jess has written some very sort of intense, sort of deep dives on thematic concerns in Julia’s work. But Hannah, you’ve responded through poetry and fictional vignettes, and I was wondering if we could impose upon you a little today and ask you to read one of those poems that you’ve written in response to Julia’s work.

Hannah 10:42

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was such a privilege, as Leigh mentioned, to have the opportunity to not only respond to Julia’s works in terms of the artwork in and of itself, but also to be able to access a lot of your thinking behind your practice, and also the practice. I mean, I’m a writer. I come very much from a literary landscape, so a lot of this was incredibly new to me. But as we started these conversations, one of the things that I think we first found ourselves being truly in simpatico with was a particular interest, like you mentioned, in Iceland, in particular aspects of folklore, and something which I really loved early on was all the tales and the discussions we had about the symbolic importance of milk in so much of folklore, in the witch’s hair, the magical hair which goes and steals milk, in the Tilberi, these little Icelandic messengers running off to steal it. I was really interested in the concept of milk as a kind of currency within sort of a historical, folkloric past, and so it felt very natural for the first poem to sort of emerge from just a very organic, intuitive response to Julia’s work to be to Nipple Post. So, this is Nipple Post.

When first I lapped the knotted wood,
I found no purchase for the tongue, only teeth,
Lodged in unbound timber.

I bit.
I bit till carved through scrape and splinter,
my mouth found out a tenderness,
a give amongst the grain, yearning over cane.
I bled my milk-bow dry, I milked it dry of blood.

Wet-mouthed, warmed by wood-press, witch-breast,
I turned out into cold, dark, and snow to seek the suckle-flesh.
I creep, I creep, and hunt out those who sleep,
and of those resting cows, and also mothers.
Their babes twitch, pink-skinned,
outside, the wind.

I suckle those women dry, until their milk is bled,
and hurry back to Witchwood to feed her as I am fed.

(Applause)

Julia 12:59

Goosebumps!

Andrew 13:00

Thank you, Hannah. The design of that page is quite beautiful as well there. The justification of the poem follows the sculpture that sits beside it, the Nipple Post sculpture that Julia made. And it made me think, I was really intrigued because I knew from working with Julia how heavily influenced her work has long been by folklore, myth, fiction and poetry. And she’s often sort of transmutes those stories into objects. But for your responses to her work, you’ve worked in the opposite way. You’ve lifted stories out of these objects and I’m just curious as to what that process was like for you.

Hannah 13:31

Yeah, like I said, it was quite an intuitive process, and it was certainly one that I think needed to be informed by a greater understanding of the history of your work, the history of your thinking, your manner of approach to the subject. And I felt like once we had had these incredible slide nights and I had been given this incredible backstage access to all of this, to your research, but also how you make your objects, the ways in which you do distil your research into an artwork, my process then was kind of along the lines of an intuitive extraction.

So I felt like these are items, these are objects which contain multitudes and then it was my… responsibility I suppose as a writer to sit with it and to be able to pull out some element of the story and it might not be the same thing that you invested within it but it’s something that I’m trying to build up out of the essence of the object; and this was something that didn’t necessarily come immediately to me this is completely new for me as a writer I’ve never had the incredible privilege and opportunity to respond to artwork like this but once I found a way to just kind of sit with these objects consider the ways in which they have been made I just kind of listened to them in a funny way and it was amazing how quickly these extractions, these embellishments and outpourings of stories and poems became. I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger, but I’ve never had poems published, these are my first poems which have been published.

Andrew 15:05

Congratulations!

Hannah 15:06

Thank you! But I didn’t anticipate to even be writing poems, so it was a real joy to be able to see what came of them. I felt in some ways like I was simply a medium of your artwork.

Julia 15:22

That Nipple Post one was the first one that you wrote I think and sent to me as a draft and I opened it and I read the email and I got very teary I was kind of like ‘oh my god!’, this is more amazing writing that I could have ever hoped for and imagined. Honestly that poem particularly was a real key moment for how blessed I am to have you writing for my work. Such a good piece of writing!

Hannah 15:41

It was so much fun. And so wonderful also then to know that, okay, yes, this is ringing true. And I think once you had said, yes, you’ve got the sensibility of what is here, then I felt quite free to be able to go off. But no, it was soooo much fun. I mean, Leigh said it was enjoyable. It was such an enjoyable process. Really loved it. Thank you.

Andrew 15:43

It’s a really nice metaphor that you use in there, the idea of being a medium for these works. It’s something that is coming through in this conversation about the subject matter of the work, this sort of dark folkloric ideas of horror that sit in there, which is not maybe customary for visual arts, not something we see a great deal of. But Jess, I know that your practice has quite a lot of synergy with Julia’s. Both of you are interested in these ideas of horror and the narratives that sort of feed into your work. And it’s something you’ve written about extensively in the book. Can you give us a little glimpse, a little insight into some of the things that you discuss here about how this trope or genre and the feelings that it instils function in contemporary art?

Jess 16:24

Horror kind of functions in two ways that I find really interesting. And I think the first way is that it often speaks to the kind of anxieties or the sensibilities or the values of the time in which the narrative is born. And so, I think that’s when, you know, there’s often an overlap with mythology, with folklore, with these stories that are kind of meant to impart something. They’re meant to kind of warn off or forbid certain action and things like that.  And, you know, there can be really interesting kind of windows into different times – what the concerns were, what the values were – and of course the other way which I’m also really drawn to is that it’s a highly effective media in that it isn’t about how you kind of rationally think through a narrative or respond to it. For me, a lot of horror and indeed a lot of the kind of visual art objects I’m drawn to bypass that sensible thought and bring about a kind of emotional response which I find really interesting to engage with.

So, I think that was… that was where I saw a great kind of overlap between what I do and what I’m interested in and what Julia does. She’s not a huge horror fan apart from some little genres here and there. But I think it’s just that effective potency and the ability of these narratives to draw out these social rules or lessons that otherwise go unspoken or unseen. And so, we’ve talked about a lot of these narratives being about dangerous women or, you know, the way that they were treated, and I think that’s something that they do really well. They give form to these different opinions and… you get goosebumps, or you get elevated. Like it’s really emotive for me.

Andrew 18:04

I think both of your bodies of work have that kind of visceral response or instil a visceral response. And they don’t necessarily scare an audience that come in there, but they do certainly channel that what you describe as the potency of horror.

Jess 18:14 

Well, I think, you know, we can think of horror as horrifying and that’s perhaps a very simple definition. But I think, you know, it can be exhilarating and scary and exciting and lovely. And you can kind of yearn for these stories and images. I think it is for me more about, yeah, the potency of that kind of response.

And I think certainly when I look at a lot of Julia’s work, it’s that kind of potency of feeling that kind of leaps out at me and what I was really excited to try and bring to the fore as someone who both responds to it and tries to create it.

Andrew 18:48

Jess, what I really appreciated was that deep dive into those thematic concerns and Leigh, I loved the expansive approach of your essay that covers so much of Julia’s practice. One of the things that really stuck out to me was the connections that you’ve made art historically and to international practitioners, drawing on people like Louise Bourgeois, but more interesting sort of tangential connections like Marc Chagall. Can you tell us a little bit about that process of writing and connecting and finding those kind of threads as it were that connect Julia’s practice to an international sphere?

Leigh 19:40

Well, I think the process of seeing the development of Julia’s practice and just remembering first-hand coming to Julia’s work, I think one of the first exhibitions I saw was the song of Master John Goodfellow – is that right? – at Paul Greenway’s gallery. The, like you’re saying Jess, the undertones of horror but also a sense of frivolity, a kind of a cheekiness, a little bit of perversity in the way that materials were used and for that body of work Julia had done a series before that which was looking at the Icelandic witch trials and looking at milk and stealing milk and the idea of the. . .  the witch and how she’d been unduly interrogated and how that was expressed through work using boiled wool and wood and very kind of natural materials, kind of bleaching them out. I think I described it kind of as the colour of loss.

And then moving into this kind of harvest pageant or parade of engaging with the gourd. And the gourd, as you know from her work, is used as both an armature but also a material. Something that’s quite phallic and also kind of unruly. And then Julia would suture together using incredible Elizabethan sewing techniques and using reams and reams of shot silk in golds and yellows and bronzes and the colour of earth and making these incredible smocked cowls and then dressing these cheeky little phallic-like, cheeky little gourds that she would get from the ‘gourd father’.

(Laughter) 

And I’d never seen anything like it. They’re so original and exciting and I think the goats come earlier on, right? So, it’s great that we’ve got a cavorting couple of goats in the background to look at those. I mean it’s incredibly hard to do. And I remember asking Julia, how did you make them? And she’s like, “well I just… just went and hung out and looked at goats for a long time… went to a friend’s farm and really studied the anatomy to be able to make a goat”. She’s like “well I just started working with fiberglass and making a shape that was like a goat and then it got more and more goat-like”, and then she taught herself how to do it and so at each point there’s been these kind of material transformations that have shifted across these bodies of work, from the goats to the gourds, but they’re also very…

Andrew 21:53

That’s the possible title of the book, ‘From Goats to Gourds’.

(Laughter)

Leigh 22:01

So, yeah, so many great similes.

Yeah, I just remember coming to that show of yours, Julia, at Greenaway Gallery, and I was just like, these are so original, they’re so idiosyncratic. They do sit within larger investigations by female sculptors. Internationally, Louise Bourgeois is someone who always comes to mind, someone who also has a background with tapestry and sewing, but to use textiles in such a way, I wasn’t really seeing anyone else making that kind of work. So, whilst I could see it within other traditions, and I could see the conversations that were being had with, say, Sera Waters and Fiona Hall.

We’ve talked a lot about the influence of your background and growing up in Manningtree, the smallest and apparently most superstitious village in England, and that’s kind of where you come from. So there’s this wellspring of superstition and corrupted curses and ideas of harvest and folk horror, you’ve grown up on them, and then over time they’ve become part of your own language and myth-making, and it’s just been kind of incredible to see materially how you’ve moved across those, and then to Hieronymus Bosch, the series at the MCA, for the National with beautiful purple and pink silks, through to Beatrice which is on the cover of the SALA magazine and will be returning for Radical Textiles at the end of the year.

Your thinking, your way of moving through an idea but to make it entirely your own and rethink and reinvent myths and mythology from Icelandic witch trials through to gothic narrative with Beatrice grafting together Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter but with the story of Scylla who was a nymph who Circe had poisoned the water and these ideas of metamorphosis and surrealism are really there in your practice at every turn they just keep turning over and becoming these unruly bodies and forms. Yeah, obviously I’m a big fan! Y’all can read more about it in the book in a much more organised way.

Andrew 24:10

I want to just bring us back to the book momentarily I mean this is an absolutely beautiful object Julia, congratulations. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like working with Rachel on the design of this book and what you were hoping for?

Julia 24:51

Yeah, sure, can I hold it while I do it? (Andrew: Yeah, you can hold it.) Yeah, great. So, Wakefield choose the designer for you and obviously think about your work and who you might work with. So, Rachel was asked to do the book for me, I hadn’t met her until that point. And we sat down in the first few meetings, and I talked about what I hoped the book would look like. I’m not a minimalist or a white space person, white makes me uncomfortable. And I said to Rachel early on, “I really want my book to be lush and colourful.” And she was like, “yes, I’ve seen your work. It’s not going to be white. It can’t be.” And I also spoke to her about this initial idea that we’d been also working with the three writers about what I kind of thought of as like a folk anthology, thematic chapters throughout the book where the different pieces of writing would be corralled into thematic sections. And I really wanted that to work, and it really has come together beautifully and under Rachel’s design. It’s my first book. I didn’t know what to expect or how much input I could or should have. And Rachel just was amazing. She’s over there. She guided me through the process and was really receptive to my prodding.

But, you know, can we do this, and can we try this? But also, she just laid forth in the first couple of meetings this amazing vision for the different way the text could work. So, Leigh’s essay, which is the intro essay, which has these amazing close ups and really lush, rich pages all the way through… full page intestines… (shows book to audience, laughter) …again like bucket list tick.

Andrew 25:50

If that’s not going to sell the book, what’s going to?

(Laughter)

Julia 25:52

Fabric intestines! Because I’d never… I just thought it would just be text and image, I don’t have any concept of design and Rachel just brought this incredible lens to it and this vivid understanding of my practice and the way the book could kind of flow, so these are some of the chapter headings – Splicing, Dicing and Cleaving – so these mark the kind of transition…

Andrew 26:12

Some of your rare drawings.

Julia 26:14

Yeah exactly, little scraper board drawings… and these mark the transition from Leigh’s major essay to the corralling, a major text by Jess, four major texts and four chapters and a piece or a couple of pieces from Hannah alongside that, and then we talked about the cover and that happened really quickly: we had a couple options and I was like this is definitely the cover; and once we had this cover of this big work Rachel and I had this concept of having the red edges of the book spray painted, and I was like I want this book to feel like you’re cracking open a fruit or a body or something, you know opening up this this rich velvety red item and you would enter the book like an object, and we were very lucky that Wakefield agreed to this and did it, and it’s come out beautifully!

It was just a delight working with Rachel, we had a lot of fun together a lot of cheeky conversations and we just really were really synchronized and it’s just a stunning item.

Andrew 27:10

You also had a lot of beautiful work to draw from all that wonderful photography over 20 years of practice, it’s actually really fantastic to see it realized and coalesced into this object… you’ll be very proud of.

Julia 27:23

A lot of really lush details, which as a textile artist and when I buy books about textiles I like those details. I want to be taken into the stitching and not just looking at the bigger pictures. Yeah, we managed to get all of that. Three main photographers in my life. Mick Bradley who I was using until he passed away, he was amazing. James Field, who I was using till he went off to do weddings; and Sam Roberts, he’s my current photographer now, and they’ve all just grabbed my work. Yeah lush. (Hands the book back to Andrew)

Andrew 28:20

Oh, I get to hold it again Hannah, do you mind if I throw back to you? I’m really curious It’s something you were sort of touching on before but in my mind writers and artists seem to work in very similar ways, it’s sort of a lot of solitary making, creating from scratch and the process of refining and constant turning over this material. But you’ve really sort of crossed artistic thresholds entering into the visual arts world to participate in this book. What has that experience been like? Have you found it welcoming? What are the differences? What was it like entering into the visual art world?

Hannah 28:24

Oh, wow. I found it incredibly inspiring, and I feel a great sense of gratitude to these three women for being so welcoming of me within this space because there’s so much which I don’t know. And to this day, I ask very dumb questions. Like, I didn’t realize you don’t always get to pick the name of your show, for example. Just learned that before, five minutes before we started talking. But I mean, I think the process of learning for me always makes any kind of creative practice feel heightened if you have a very steep learning curve. And I feel like that was, again, another gift of this whole process was I was able to ask many questions and then build out of that curiosity as well in terms of how I wanted to respond.

I was really interested that so much of Julia’s practice seemed to mirror my own. I think I was really interested in the ways in which both of us spent so much time researching, our manner of researching, whether that be sort of like a magpie collection of all the things that we find interesting and putting them together and waiting to see what rises out of it, or very specific sort of directional research too, like I want to get to the bottom of this, I have these questions.

So, I think that what I ended up discovering was that while the expression is vastly different, so much of the early stages of visualization and research particularly, that early stage of putting a body of work together or coming, like conceptualization I guess, is actually very, very similar. And what then differed is… is how you choose to express it. For me, as a novelist, I would probably follow, Julia and I would shadow us up to a point, and then for me, it becomes a deep dive into the interior space. So, it becomes developing characters, these people who are going to experience the things that I’ve been researching, the ways in which their response to those things are then going to express the narrative shape of a book.

I think for me, I ended up with the impression that so much visual art is a lot more akin to poetry, where there’s a kind of precision involved that I think is not necessarily there in longer narrative forms. And I found that incredibly inspiring, and I ended up wondering whether that was maybe one of the reasons why I found my own contributions to this book to be poetic in nature, because there seemed to be something similar there. You know, you’re giving a great suggestion of meaning, you’re looking for a real emotional response rather than an intellectual one with a lot of these themes and these areas of concern. But I mean, it’s made me want to come here actually and study.

(Laughter)

Andrew 30:50

That’s what I was getting at, really.

Hannah 30:53

It’s made me want to diversify, but I think there’s always something so invigorating, refreshing to an artist to be able to look at other artists in other forms and see how they practice. I mean, it’s a wonderful way to remind yourself that what you’re doing isn’t necessarily something in solitude, that you’re part of a wider community. Yeah, I found it, you know, wonderful, actually… really wonderful.

Andrew 31:11

Well, it’s really lovely to hear that there’s that synergy both in the process, what happens that is hidden from the eyes of the reader or the audience for a visual arts exhibition. Because I think that on the surface, the encounter with both of the products of your labour, there are huge sort of synergies and connections and this sort of fascination with things on both of the not so recent past, things from the other side of the globe, ideas and experiences is something that really comes through in your book. But it’s lovely to hear that it goes deeper than that. And there’s also that connection and ways of working and ways of thinking.

Hannah 31:45

I think we had quite a few giddy afternoons, and we’re like, have you read this book? Have you seen this movie? It’s like we’re comparing research notes, we’ve compared bookshelves. So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of that.

Andrew 31:54

But also, you touch on there something that I’m just really curious about, about that similarity between the object, the sort of precision and concision of an object and poetry, which is also something about conciseness and getting it right the first time in terms of language. Your encounter with Julia’s work, how much of it was tactile with the actual object itself and how much of it was looking back through the archives of photographs of Julia?

Hannah 32:19

Very little of it was actually tactile when it came to it. I was introduced to your work through images, the photographs, the beautiful photographs that we see in this book now, but I think that’s why you, speaking of how you created them, gave them a three dimensionality that perhaps I otherwise couldn’t access and that’s why that became such an important part to my own response to the book. I mean this is the first time I’ve seen the goats and it’s so fantastic, it feels you know like a lovely thing to be able to finally see them, but yeah it would have been great, but I also was able to visit your studio, so it didn’t necessarily feel like something was being withheld from me.

Andrew 32:55

I get it, as a curator, I get to carry these things around. So, I get a very intimate understanding of what it is. No one else can touch it. It’s just for curators! (Laughter)

But on this idea of materials, Jess, I’d just like to touch on something that you wrote, I think, early on. It might have even been part of the proposal for the book, but later got incorporated into the preface for the book. And you talk about how “process and labour are key to the act of creation that artists undergo when research is alchemized into work”. And I think there’s a really lovely precision in what you’re talking about there and the way in which Julia takes materials, takes research and sort of fuses them together and creates these objects. And I think for, it was something that Julia touched on when she was talking about before, the perspective of a fellow maker, of a fellow artist was very vital to this book. Do you just want to touch on a little bit of Julia’s material processes that you’ve witnessed or you’re aware of as well?

Jess 33:53

When I was thinking about how I would respond to Julia’s practice, you know, even in those very early days before we perhaps really thought about these, these kinds of separate chapters, when I was thinking about what can I offer to this? Like what kind of perspective can I, can I give? I think there’s something like almost beyond description about the way that a lot of artists can work. We can try and kind of explain like, oh, well, I research, and I look at things and I experiment and then the work happens. I think it’s something that’s much more beyond capturing than that. Certainly, with Julia’s practice, which I know is one that has such an intensive research and gathering of materials and really deeply diving through all of these things. And I think when you’re kind of going through that process as a maker, I was coming up with a lot of metaphors to talk about how I might communicate this. Early on, one of them was this kind of active of consuming all these things from the world and then something happening internally. And then you kind of birth this thing up, which is, it’s not the sum of its parts. It’s not, you know, simply kind of suturing things together. It is this kind of alchemy of materials of research.

When you’re an artist that yeah, heavily researched, but also does that material research of taking materials and seeing what they can do, how far they can be pushed before, you know, they kind of, they give up or they fall over, or they stop working. It’s not predictable. You don’t kind of begin with an outcome, or if you do, you’re sure to be pleasantly disappointed, I suppose. I think like a lot of what I wanted to do is, in as much as I think words ever could, guide someone through that process of, you kind of give yourself over to the research, to the materials, it is a kind of exchange between the two of you where autonomy or control is always oscillating between you.

And certainly I think with the kind of effective kind of potency of a lot of the materials in Julia’s work, we talked about gourds, which some of my favourite works, I’m just like, oh my God, they’re just the kind of perfect object that has been transformed through what Julia’s brought to them, but even, textiles and the way that they’re treated, treated in ways that I don’t think anyone else could treat them.

There’s something… something really interesting in that, something really unknowable in the beginning in that process. So yeah, that’s kind of what I wanted to try and talk around if I couldn’t kind of describe it exactly, if that’s a good answer.

Andrew 36.33

That’s an excellent answer, thank you. I might just stay with you for a moment because it was really lovely hearing Hannah talk about what sounds to me like a new friendship, this sort of connection and this understanding that the two of you have found, but of the three writers on this panel, you’ve known Julia the longest and said quite a significant impact on your life. It’s not something that is really touched on in the book, but I’m just curious about what that experience is like to know someone for so long and then have this opportunity. to get to put some of that into words.

Jess 37:03

Yeah, I mean, I think it was kind of absolutely delightful and a dream, like for a little bit, I was like, oh, this is so intimidating. As Julia mentioned, you know, she was my lecturer in first year, so saw a lot of blind, kind of fumbling around what I was about and what I might do and some things which are best never spoken about again, (laughter) in terms of my artistic output. But I think that was also a really important, yeah, lecturer-student relationship, because I think, you know, you come to art school, you wanna make stuff, but what do you wanna make? You’ve got no idea.

You’ve got these interests that you can’t really even speak to. They’re just hovering in your periphery a bit. And so, you know, you do look to other people to be like, what are the possibilities here? What can I kind of do? Where can I go?

And I think as a student and then an early, an emerging artist, an early career artist, Julia was so pivotal in lighting the way of what the possibilities were within kind of an arts practice, kind of rigour that I think this career demands and the outcomes that come from applying yourself in these ways. I also think that pretty early on was a really nice kind of resonance between our work as well, like I’ve always admired Julia’s work, the power of the things she makes, the kind of presence that her objects make. They always have a mood board of artists that are all kind of doing the things that you might hope to do one day. So, she’s always been someone I really admire. I felt like there was a kind of connection and things that I could talk about and draw out. It was kind of completely wonderful to be able to talk about someone whose practice I’ve known for so long and yeah, someone who I consider a friend… dream artist.

Julia 38:49

I just want to also say though, like, because I’m such a fan of Jess’s work, and there’s some, there’s definitely those people you work with as a student who you just think, I can’t wait for you to just graduate, I’m going to be friends, like, we’re going to have this like, this other relationship framed by an institution. And I’ve bought a lot of Jess’s work in the past, and I remember the first work I bought of yours is quite an intense lenticular print with a lot of blood in it and a knife and my mum just hates, she’s very upset by it, and I was like, I freaking love it!

And yeah, so I, you know, when I buy work, I buy things by people I just really respect and admire. So, for me, this was like, this is an opportunity for me to have you write about my work. Like, that’s all of you. That’s my opportunity. I feel so lucky. So yeah, feeling’s mutual.

Andrew 39:34

This is quite heartwarming. I’m sort of quite envious to not be part of this wonderful little club that’s sprung up. And digging into my envy and jealousy, Leigh, (laughter) you’ve had the opportunity of working with Julia multiple times now, both in the Versus Rodin exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Monster Theatres, where you commissioned the work Beatrice, putting together this sort of mini retrospective and sculptural storytelling that’s on at the Art Gallery at the moment, and then as you alluded to before, bringing Beatrice back for Radical Textiles. I’ve finally had my chance to work with Julia. It was an absolute delight. But can you give us a little insight on what it’s like to work with Julia as a curator?

Leigh 40:16

Well, a dream artist is probably the, you know, we’ll keep riffing on that idea, but I think it’s very exciting seeing how Julia works. Julia was in the National at the MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and she’d made this incredible suite of nine works that were responding to or having a conversation with Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights over time and pulling elements from that out and giving them a body and a life, and they were somewhere between, they’re biomorphic, but they’re anthropomorphic.

You know, it’s interesting that you work in three dimensions in such a particular way. I love sculpture, it’s probably one of my great loves, and then also to see how experimental you are with materials. You know, I was working on the 2020 Adelaide Biennial which was about monster theatres and it was about the idea of monsters as warnings and the different forms they take and I knew Julia was working really hard on the National and probably, I know I’ve got Gabby and Jenna here from Hugo Michell and they know that she’s very exacting in how much time, she knows how long this is going to take because, you know, there is time embodied in the work. You can see in the detail, in the smocking, in the sewing, in the treatment of the material, just your level of perfectionism and so you know there’s a lot of time and so I knew that I couldn’t do an exhibition called Monster Theatres without Julia in it and so I had to wait until she just got it up in Sydney and then literally I called Hugo Michell the day after and I was like, can I just check with Julia, I really want her to make a new work, a really major work that comes out of the ground that’s kind of three dimensional, it’s not on the wall and he’s like yeah go for it, I think now’s the time and we gave you a call and I was like okay, do you want to make something major and also for the Museum of Economic Botany, also has its own little gourd display if you’ve ever been there, so you know it was ripe with connections and so it was one of those wonderful things where I think in the knowing of someone’s work, and we tested out some things and you’d made commissioned work for Versus Rodin which was about bodies across space and time and thinking through sculpture. Also, it’s very exciting because you can see all these leaps in the artist’s practice as they’re going along, and then when you can provide a context which is meaningful, the armature of an exhibition with a very specific theme that speaks to all of your ideas, and you’re like, what’s the work that you really want to make? Like, if you could make a really major work, what would you do, and how would you do it, and could it be three-dimensional and on the floor? And so, you know, but sometimes those parameters, it was really exciting because I think you called back like a week later, and you’re like, I got it. And, you know, maybe you can talk about that, you know?

Julia 43:04

Yeah, it was like that. You sort of proposed the show, The Space, and I was like, okay, okay, okay. I think it was about nine months to do it, and I was like, right. And then I just was reading a book about poison, and I was just at the perfect chapter, and it just coalesced, and I, yeah, I rang you back and was like, I know exactly what I’m doing. And you were like, whoa, okay, that’s really quick, and I’m like, great, we have to get, we have to jump on this, like, yeah. So it was, that was one of the few kind of quick works in a way, but I guess it was, it had come from another body of work. It was that little leaping point off. But yeah, it was the perfect prompting. Mad Leigh, Monster Theatres, and just…

Leigh 43:39

And Beatrice is born.

Julia 43:41

She just sort of sprang up. She literally sprang up. Yeah.

Leigh 43:45

I think I talk about Beatrice in the book as this process of becoming itself, Beatrice being related to Scylla, the poisonous goddess, and grafted with this botanic twin from Rappaccini’s Daughter, but then it becomes something else. And just on a formal level, I think when you’re looking at sculpture from Renaissance to now and all the experiments that have happened since, and then she was testing all of these things in her studio, making little 3D-printed mock-up, and it was also something that was talking to the history of dynamic sculpture and forms in space, and so to be able to see how she’d created these writhing, half tendrils, half tentacles moving out of the space, and you can walk around this kind of tormented goddess, but she’s so powerful and so glorious, and you’ve captured that in shot silk and Elizabethan slashing techniques where the insides are coming out, and it’s just so exciting and so vivid.

I’ve learned so much about Greek mythology, about Gothic literature, and gone into the territory of the witch, the most misunderstood woman, and I think that’s also exciting when you’re thinking in time, what is an artist doing, why is it important? And right now, Madeline Miller rewrote a book on Circe and retelling the story of Circe from her perspective, not from a male perspective or another perspective, and then you are also doing that as well, so you’re giving back voice to these misunderstood figures through your work as well, and so it’s very much a part of a feminist reimagining, and retelling, and reclaiming things through sculptural form, but wonderful conversations across literature, film, and everything that you do. And we haven’t even started talking about the smocks yet. So, but yeah.

Andrew 45:30

Leigh, just knowing that we touched so evocatively talking about Beatrice, would you mind just giving everyone a slightly better look at your earrings that you’re wearing at the moment?

Leigh 45:37

Yes. Yeah, they’re a little, I think, was it from the 3D?

Julia 45:32

Yeah, Jess made me a 3D version of Beatrice, all bits so I can model her in space.

Leigh 45:47

Yeah, this is my lucky Beatrice earrings. Yeah, on theme.

Andrew 45:52

Earlobe tendrils.

Julia 45:53

Earlobe tendrils.

(Giggles)

Andrew 45:55

Thank you all very much for your generosity. If you don’t mind, we might open up questions to the audience now. Does anyone have any questions for our panel of writers plus artist?

(Awkward silence)

I’ve kind of sprung that on you, maybe I’ll let you dwell on that a little bit.

Just going back to that process of what I was asking Leigh, of working with you as a curator. This isn’t so much a question, it’s just an observation, because I’ve now had the delight of working with you as a curator. I remember before the MCA show, and before the Art Gallery show, seeing you in the kitchen down there, and I think both times you’re saying to me, I’ve only got nine months, 12 months, I’ve only got this amount of time to do it, I don’t know how I’m going to do this whole show. And inevitably, you finish six weeks before the deadline.

(Laughter)

Andrew 46:49  

Which is quite a phenomenal achievement, as it were. But it was also an absolute delight to work with you in the gallery and see the diligence with which you work, and I think that was kind of a bit of a high wire act for you, because normally everything is completely finished, and this was a process that through the ambition of the work, it could only be completed in space. What is your secret, Julia?

Julia 47:16

What’s my secret?

(Laughter)

I work really hard. I work out how much teaching I have, two to three days a week, and then I work every other day in the studio. So, I don’t really have weekdays and weekends, I have show and then not show. I take the down time when I can take the down time, when I’ve got maybe a little gap between shows, which can vary. But I just really love making. It feeds me and being an artist is my identity. It’s bound up in my mental health. It’s what works for me. I can’t get enough of the studio.

You know, I really like it. I like to go to the studio every day if I can, but three specific days of the year. New Year’s Day, right? Start the year how you intend to go. My birthday, because it’s my favourite thing to do, birthday present. And I normally like to get to the studio the day after a show opens, as a kind of a symbol of like, I’m still going, I’m not pausing. I haven’t had time this time because I’ve been doing other things. I don’t know, that’s the secret. I just, I commit everything to it. Time, resources, money, energy, because it’s what feeds me and sustains me and it’s what I have to do.

Andrew 48:19

I think that absolutely comes through in this book. (Julia: Thank you.) And I think it comes through in the quality of the work. (Julia: Thank you.) Congratulations. (Julia: Thank you.)

(Audience applauds)

Andrew 48:30

And now we have a question. Yes, please. Speak up, speak loud.

Audience member 1 48:37

I was just wondering how, and I might have missed it, but how you worked out where everyone fits in the book?

Julia 48:43

Like the literal chaptering? Yeah, that’s a great question. So, Leigh alluded to this sort of mind map that we did early on because I knew that when I had spoken to these three people, I was like I don’t expect you to cover everything all of them. Like I was like, what’s your area of strength and expertise? And Leigh was sort of the anchor essay, so she had to cover a lot, but Jess and Hannah in particular it was like, this is a particular area of expertise.

So anyway, so once we had kind of done the mind map and they had kind of circled the bits they liked I kind of looked at what the kind of umbrella chapter headings might be and then when the writing started coming in it started to formulate. I was like okay well Jess has written this essay about satanic panic. Which chapter is that again? Can you open up the thing? What’s the satanic panic one? Oh, ‘The Witched and Bedevilled’ right? So, I was like that’s the kind of witch-devil chapter. Which then meant that I looked at the pieces of writing that Hannah had done and was like oh well this seems to most relate to the kind of witch or devil component. And then yeah you know with ‘Ripe for Sacrifice’ this is the folk horror one, Jess had particularly written a text anchored to folk horror and The Wicker Man, my favourite film. And then Hannah had written you know other pieces Hannah had written I was like well that’s the one that most relates to that body of work or deals in those themes. So, the chapters kind of emerged out of the writing. I knew I wanted the chapters but then they kind of emerged from the writing and then corralling them into these ones kind of sync up together and then I came up with the titles for the chapters. So yeah. (Audience member: Thank you.) And then Leigh’s is the kind of blood milk poison and soil the sort of the overarching one.

Andrew 50:26

Yeah, and it’s quite a wonderful experience of reading it as well the through the design everything is distinct typographically, so you never get lost in there or get confused about which? Authors work you’re reading at any one time. But I think I saw another question.

Audience member 2 50:43

Congratulations, Julia. I love your show, and I think you’ve done amazing work over the years. I’ve just seen you just go forth and flourish, so congratulations.

Yeah, I just wanted to also ask, because you may have already talked about this before I came in, but what sort of things do you do in planning, apart from reading, and you mentioned about doing like 3D models for this work here, but do you do much drawing and other things? As an artist, I’d love to know.

Julia 51:11

Yeah, so my kind of preparatory stage can be quite long, can be some months before I start making, finalising works. Full immersion in books, texts, films, other artists, so much scrolling through Google and just looking for things, and then what would be material research, which is collecting objects and materials, or scanning through my studio and pinning things up and then taking them down. I have lots of fabric swatches and things, so it’s sort of about being in the studio and having all that stuff around me in my periphery or in my frontal vision so that I don’t get distracted and don’t get lost. I make and remake works sometimes. I like to be able to pull them apart if they’re not working and then put them back together in better ways. So yeah, it can be a very fluid process of full immersion in the kind of content and then kind of starting, but yeah, sketching, like constantly sketching and writing and writing and writing notes, and whatever journal I’m kind of in for a show, I’ll start each day by reading it from the beginning and be like, what was I thinking five days ago, ten days ago, today?

Audience member 2 52:19

It’s very methodical.

Julia 52:20

Yes, it is pretty methodical it’s just like it’s like you know in the best sense of the word it’s a job you know you do the job and that’s what the job entails but it’s just an enjoy really enjoyable job. But yeah, sketch all the time.

Andrew 52:32

I think we had another question up the back there.

Audience member 3 52:33

Hi, thank you. What I’m getting is that when you’re not working here, you’re in the studio. How many hours a day would you be putting in and do you ever have down time?

(Laughter)

Do you ever, without wanting to put a negative slant on it – because I’m always interested to hear from artists – do you ever doubt what you’re doing, and why am I doing it, or do I want to do it?

Julia 53:01

Yeah, yeah, there’s always, I don’t know, there’s not constantly self-doubt, but there’s always pockets of self-doubt, and probably my studio colleagues, when I’m in it, it’s probably quite powerful, and like, why am I doing this? And then I’ll come out of it, and they’ll be like, that was pretty bad, and I’ll be like, no, that was fine, and they’ll be like, no, we were there, we were in the studio with you, you were big time doubting. But you know, you can go through kind of waves of work, of full confidence in it, and then you might have a little sort of cliff you fall off, and you have to sort of start again. What was the other question? Do you have downtime? Yes, I’m fairly like nine to five, or you know, that sort of person in the studio, and so I have, I guess I take my downtime in the evenings. I do dancing, some of my dancers are in the room, and I play Dungeons and Dragons, and I read voraciously over summer, particularly when it’s too hot to go to the studio. But yeah, I’m just like a kind of like daily practice, like if I’m not teaching, go to the studio, go to the studio, nine to five, ten to six, that sort of thing, and just, you know, max out those daytime hours,  and but yeah, just do it whenever I can, weekends, weekdays, all that sort of stuff.

Audience member 4 54:08

Question for Hannah. If you were ever to come to the school and learn visual art, what would you want to do?

(Ripples of laughter)

Hannah 55:18

Oh my gosh, this is the…

Andrew 54:20

As in the full BVA?

(Laughter)

Hannah 54:25

You know, it’s funny, speaking of self-doubt, I always need to have some back-up careers, so like maybe just coming here, I’m like, maybe I could just be a visual artist. No, I don’t know. I think I probably just need to start with the basics, start with drawing, see what comes out. But I’ve been so inspired by hearing everything that I’ve heard and learnt about sculpture particularly.  I think that’s something… I love the idea of… I work in very two-dimensional forms, you know, words on a screen. It would be nice to have something which has a bit of physicality in it, I think, yeah.

Audience member 5 (Jenna)

Long time fan, first-time caller.

(Laughter)

Knowing you and knowing your work well, looking back at past series I can see that kind of a little clue to perhaps what skill or something that you might carry over. In speaking to the current show down in the gallery, I note that the tree structure is kind of a shift and I’m curious to know what elements you might kind of be pushing in perhaps like little clues into what might be in the studio next.

Julia 55:32

Yeah, so the tree that Jenna’s talking about is this sort of fabric tree constructed out of printed fabric scythes and pitchforks and that came about because I’d been working with real scythes and pitchforks and making a lot of physical sculptures. So, when I work with the scythes and the pitchforks and put them on the wall, I need a metal worker to do my metal brackets for me, which I have James Sodden. He’s an amazing metal worker. He’s an incredibly intuitive artist and maker and he’s been wonderful. But I like to do things myself and I wanted to kind of pull the tools back into a space where I could control them in a language I understood, which is fabric, and see if I could try to use them less as kind of physical objects and more the imprint of them so I just and also then I can have as many as I want, like print on demand sides instead of having to like scour gum tree and like find the one or two that are available because I’ve milked this state dry. (Laughter) I’ve probably had like 10 or 12 scythes from every place I could find, and I wanted 40.

If that’s our answers your question, yeah I was just sort of playing with the objects as back in fabric land and just sort of seeing what I could do with them as fabric and I couldn’t have built that tree any other way I don’t think I couldn’t have done it in a metal freestanding thing I wouldn’t have had the resources the skill or the number of tools to do it and needed to be…

Andrew 56:51

… or the health and safety approval.

(Laughter)

 Julia 56:52

Or the health and safety approval, yeah, so you know for me like art’s all about problem-solving and if I want to make something I’ll just find a way to problem-solve and that was like well if I want to do this thing it has to be done that way, it has to be done in a different way.

So, I’m excited about where they could take me. I never know until I finish a body of work where I’m going to start next; we have to get back in the studio, we have to pull some things out, we have to see what happens… not sure yet but thank you.

Andrew 57:19

Tina, I think you had a question, as well?

Audience member 6 (Tina) 57:21

This one may be a little bit personal, so feel free not to answer, but it’s directed to everybody on the panel. Each of you presents as an amazingly optimistic person, and yet you’ve each chosen to focus on the dark side of human nature, including you, Leigh, with Monster Theatres in some of the work… two minutes each? (Laughter) Why do you focus on the darker side of human nature?

Julia 57:53

That is human nature, you know it is it’s a complex duality and it’s not even just a duality it’s so many layers. I’ve just always been drawn to that darker side, and I think there’s a frisson in that and it’s interesting and unexpected and I don’t like to present expected things, and I do like beautiful things, I like to make beautiful things. I like to undercut it with something else and I think that’s just, broadly speaking, that’s our experience of the world and moments of sheer pleasure and then you just have horrible scenarios as well, but that’s just how I process the world. I don’t process it through purely a kind of optimistic positive lens, I process it through the darker deeper stories and what they say about us as humans, and I’m drawn to them and that’s how the work manifests for me so that’s the best reason I can give yeah.

Hannah 58:42

It’s a good question. First I remember once reading an interview with the actress Emily Watson who is known for playing some very, very dark roles, and I always remember her response which was that she had such a secure childhood and is so generally happy in and of herself that she’s kind of got this ballast, she’s got this sort of ballast of happiness so she can lean quite deeply into the dark because she’ll always come back up again. But I think the, the darkness isn’t a reflective of an individual’s sort of vision of how the world is, but I think it’s the result of asking particular questions, which is why do humans do these things? Why do we act in these ways? Why is fear such a universal response?  And look at all the things that are born from a fear response too. I think these are the most interesting questions in many, many ways. But I would also say that in all of our various practices, the light gets in there too. I think that’s necessary.

Nothing that we would present is unequivocal in that sort of statement that this is how things are. They are dark, they are drear. We’re not escaping that. And more it’s like, why do people in these circumstances maybe act in these ways? Or why do we have this aspect of folkloric superstition? Or what is this actually saying about the human condition?

Jess 59:54

Are we going in a line?

Leigh 59:57

Sure. It looks like it. But yeah, I think the locus of fear is something that is universally felt. Looking at how, Julia, how you… manoeuvre those different stories into different forms and thinking about the idea of metamorphosis, transforming from one state into another, from one form into another. I think Marina Warner says that there’s a fear in the beast that’s being created or the figure or the form that’s being created. There is a kind of humour and a pathos in it at the same time, so yeah that kind of light and dark, but that there’s something in the act of transformation that I find so compelling in the work is that you’re moving through these different states to understand the nature of fear and the human condition.

In the end we have these incredible gifts and offerings that yourself and other artists create and bring into the world, but what’s at stake at that is a huge amount of work, labour, sacrifice, psychological interrogation, deep dives, self-doubt. If it can get shored up and channelled into these works, I think that’s why we feel them so closely; and with soft sculpture in particular there’s something tactile of the body and connecting to the body. So, it comes back to us in a form that we know and understand. We know what the brocade, the material is. We’re enamoured by the shimmer of soft silk. We understand the healing and warmth of wool. So, I think embedded in the materials that you choose is something that also they’re kind of indexical, I guess.

Jess 61:38

I mean, I think this question of, why are you drawn to dark things? It’s something I looked in a lot. It’s the question that is always at the forefront if you’re interested in horror and particular kind of horror scholarship. And I think people have answered that question in a lot of different ways from the like, well, you’re a messed up person, end of the spectrum. You know, all the way through to what I think are the more compelling answers. I do think a lot of these dark narratives reveal social truths about human nature and I think we are ill-equipped to fight or dismantle those if we can’t name them, if we don’t know what they look like. I think that’s really important. I also think that there’s, particularly for people who are othered through society, women, people of colour, queer people, etc, etc. A lot of these narratives have presented darkness and these kind of characters as avenue to empowerment. Like I think a lot of the horror monsters that I really like, these kind of female horror monsters, and you know, that’s how they kind of reclaim their agency in the world. And I think for that thing, they’re not dark narratives.

They are kind of hopeful in ways. There’s another idea I found really compelling was this idea of we engage with these dark narratives in the same way that children engage in play fighting, in that we’re kind of prepping ourselves for the things that could be out there. And so, yeah, maybe I’m an optimist in certain days of the week. But I also think it’s that knowledge is power thing. And when we can dive into these narratives without that risk of injury, we can kind of get an idea of what’s out there, of what we might be up against. And I don’t see it as dark, really, in a kind of negative sense. I see it as empowering more so.

Andrew 63:26

Okay, one last question. Yes, go for it. I don’t want to deny you.

Audience member 7 63:30

What does this mean for you, this award? What does it mean for you, for professional and personal, and where is it going to take you?

Julia 63:42

Obviously, it means a great deal. It’s an acknowledgement of a lot of hard work and energy and everything I’ve put into my practice. I hope for a long, sustained career doing what I love, and I feel really privileged to have that opportunity and that it’s going so well.

So, this is an acknowledgement of that. It’s a wild opportunity to have at this point in my career. Everyone’s been so generous with their time and energy and their accolades. It’s quite overwhelming at points and beautiful. It’s my first book, so it’s a document of what I’ve done so far that I hope to share with other people. When I look at other artists out in the world, I want to be able to access their work and be inspired by them, so hopefully this is a little thing back out there for other people. I buy a lot of art books. It’s nice to have mine out there on the shelf as well.

(Laughter)

Andrew 64.35

I think you spoke very evocatively as well, Julia, during your SALA keynote address about what significant SALA had for you and seeing these books and joining this sort of community. Yeah, do I want to use the word pantheon? Yeah, pantheon!

Julia 64:49

So, SALA has been going since 1998 when I was in Year 12. In my professional career I’ve grown up alongside SALA. I’ve grown up with it and seen it grow. It’s celebrating artists and I love artists I love all artists and all art, some more than others, but I get to be part of that family of books I get to share that honour, that accolade with other people. And I want it to continue… There’s so many other artists you know, in the world, in the room, whose books I want to have, right? I want to read about them as well.

Andrew 65:21

Wonderful. Can you please all join me in thanking Julia Robinson, Hannah Kent, Leigh Robb and Jess Taylor.

(Audience gives hearty applause)