Once seen, Sally Robinson’s works are never forgotten.
Sally Robinson came from England at the age of eight, trading a childhood in Surrey for a life in the harsh Australian sunlight. She may not have had a language barrier to overcome, but the culture shock – or perhaps the weather shock – must have been profound. Eight is an impressionable age, a time when a child’s personality and preferences are finding forms that will stay with them for the rest of their life.
In the silk screen prints Robinson made in the 1970s and 80s one can still feel the impact of that childhood relocation. Although they depict relatively ordinary aspects of Australian life - birds and animals, the beach, the desert, suburban pastimes – these works are so bright and colourful that they feel unnatural, as if the artist has dialled up the intensity beyond the point where most of us feel comfortable.
By contrast, Robinson’s prints feel as fresh as the day they were made, as visitors to her 50-year survey at the S.H. Ervin Gallery will discover. Looking at two large triptychs,, one is struck by the vibrancy of the landscape, the brilliant light, and the crowds of birds and animals., made at a time when the Australian film industry was in hibernation.
Robinson has completed more than 50 portraits in a little over 20 years, in a highly distinctive style. Although she always aims for a realistic likeness, the surfaces of each work are treated in a more experimental fashion, with colour applied in tiny dabs or dashes, like a variation on the pointillism of Seurat and Signac. Other portraits, such as one of Justice Mary Gaudron , are viewed as if through a translucent screen of words.
This is one way of reading Robinson’s tilt into abstraction, which she handles with her usual aplomb, but for an artist who has built her reputation on strong, recognisable subject matter, it’s difficult to see these new works as much more than sophisticated decorations. This impression is only confirmed by her dip back into subject painting, in, where a fuzz of words doesn’t detract from the potency of the underlying images – of a military cemetery and a sea filled with icebergs.
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