Label from the exhibition Eerie Pageantry

‘It was an honour to be offered the chance to work with the tools and twine from Driver’s decommissioned artwork Beans Lupins and Wheat. The resulting artwork We don’t go back is a collaboration of sorts wherein I leaned into key elements such as colour, composition, and materiality. It is, I hope, an honest conjunction of our aesthetic, material, and conceptual concerns, and a work in which we both have a voice’.
– Julia Robinson

In 1982, the New Zealand folk horror classic The Scarecrow was released. Based on Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s novel and set in a fictional Taranaki town, the film starts with the eerie line ‘The same night our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.’  The same year, Don Driver made the wall hanging Beans Lupin and Wheat – two pitchforks and a spade hanging from blue twine against burlap sacking and orange tarpaulin. The two have been intertwined ever since as vital expressions of a grimy New Zealand gothic.

Julia Robinson turned one in 1982—much too young to join the generation of children traumatised by the bleak horrors of The Scarecrow. Yet, in the intervening years, folk horror became a shaping force on her, while the fabric elements of Driver’s work slowly began to deteriorate and return to the earth.

This new work taps into folk horror’s key themes of rebirth and the cycles of life. With the blessing of the Driver family, Robinson has repurposed and breathed new life into the surviving elements from his decommissioned wall hanging. This sculpture/scarecrow is conceived as a collaboration with Driver, as well as a homage to his work and the folk horror tradition that binds both artists.

Julia Robinson
We don’t go back  2023
linen, thread, forks, shovel, and blue twine (from Beans Lupin and Wheat by Don Driver), steel, fixings
courtesy of the artist and Joyce Driver