Design and Art Australia Online

Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, Denise Ava Robinson, was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1959. Robinson’s art practice, which encompasses fibre work, installation and sculpture made from natural found materials began in 1997, when she enrolled in a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania’s Launceston (Newnham) campus. Between 1998 and 1999, Robinson was able to undertake one year of study at the University of Hawaii School of Art, in Manoa, Honolulu, where she worked under the guidance of the fibre artist Patricia Hickman, an artist who remained an important mentor for Robinson. One of the first group exhibitions in which Robinson’s work was included was “Surface, Structure, Space”, at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery in 1999, and she has participated in a number of Hawaiian based exhibitions and art events in subsequent years. In 1999 Robinson completed her degree, and in 2000 she completed a further year of study at the University of Tasmania, achieving a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours.

Robinson’s work reflects her sensitive and tactile engagement with the landscape. In 2001 she was awarded a Tasmanian Wilderness Residency, which allowed her to spend several months at Eddystone Point, the most easterly point on Tasmania’s north-east coast, in the Mount William National Park. The resulting work was included in the exhibition “Isolation Solitude” at Salamanca Arts Centre (2005), an exhibition which showcased the work of 18 artists who had undertaken Tasmanian Wilderness Residencies in different parts of Tasmania. In his catalogue essay for the exhibition, Peter Timms writes that upon the completion of her residency in 2003, 'Denise Robinson threw in her day-job and went to live on the remote north coast. The residency, she says “reminded me of what’s real and what matters”’ (p. 7).

Between 2003 and 2008, Robinson lived in Tam O’Shanter Bay, near Lulworth, during which her creative practice became focused upon the natural refuse that she collected on the beaches near her home. She also participated in a number of community arts projects during these years, including the “Highway 1 Project” at the Old Supreme Court House in Oatlands, for Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island Festival in 2003. This installation, entitled Many hands make light(n) work: that which makes things visible, or affords illumination involved a celebratory engagement with Indigenous Tasmanian traditions: hundreds of volunteers assisted in the creation of large, mat-like woven spirals made from wool, flax and grasses native to Tasmania.

In 2007 Robinson held her first solo exhibition, titled “Part & Particle” at the Burnie Regional Art Gallery. As Jane Stewart points out in her Artlink review of the show, the 'exhibition title is a quote from American philosopher and naturalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collection of essays, Nature (1836), writings which encourage the reader to abandon egotism and become one with the natural and elemental forces’. This philosophy has been foundational to Robinson’s practice. Her work seeks to portray the natural cycles and patterns that she observes in the landscape on an intimate scale by using a mixture of organic and non-organic mediums. The work that culminated in Robinson’s 2007 solo exhibition was informed by her exploration of coastal areas of Tasmania, and is founded upon a patient, contemplative receptiveness to environmental processes. Corraline algae, which Robinson spends many hours collecting, cleaning and drying, has become an important motif in her work. She has created fine, spare, monochrome constructions by inlaying delicate trails of the calcified algae into a surface of white oil paint on hand-made paper.

Robinson has strong familial and collegial relationships with fellow Tasmanian Aboriginal artists Lola Greeno, Vicki West and Julie Gough. Her connection with these women, as well as other Indigenous women artists such as Treanha Hamm and Lorraine Connelly-Northy, with whom she has exhibited, have informed her exploration of the nature of contemporary Indigenous identity. Her Indigenous heritage is the subtext to her attentiveness to the spirit of particular places, and the meaningful relationships that form between people and place. In correspondence with the author, Robinson writes that her intent as an artist “is to take what appears as an incidental and insignificant material to create work in a manner, and within a context, that charges a space with not only an aesthetic transformation but an ethical, cultural or social comment.”

In 2008, Robinson was undertaking a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, for which she was producing work that responded to the urban environment. Robinson was also preparing an installation to be included, alongside work produced by Lola Greeno and Lorna Riley, in a 2009 exhibition titled 'Re-earthing’ curated by Vicki West. 'Re-earthing’ was commissioned by the Devonport Regional Gallery to be part of the 2009 Ten Days On The Island Festival.

Writers:

Fisher, Laura Note: In correspondence with the artist

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed