Wellington Film Society is delighted to partner with City Gallery Te Whare Toi to celebrate the folk horror connections of our Halloween and fiftieth anniversary screening of The Wicker Man (kindly sponsored by Unity Books) and the upcoming exhibition, Eerie Pageantry.
Adelaide artist, Julia Robinson will introduce our screening of The Wicker Man at 6.15pm on 30 October, and City Gallery have organised a special tour of Eerie Pageantry at 5.45pm on 7 Tuesday November for WFS members.
Julia Robinson is an Adelaide-based artist working across sculpture and installation. Her works contain references to belief systems and folklore and reflect the artist’s fascination with how humans use ritual to address fundamental issues such as birth, sex, and death. Looking to her European-Australian ancestry as a starting point, she draws on multiple sources which include superstitions, fairy tales, and ancient rites of harvest, fertility and resurrection revived through folk horror films.
Eerie Pageantry calls forth the folk-horror-infused art of Julia Robinson and New Zealand artist Don Driver. Both artists channel and explore the dualities that sit at the dark heart of the folk horror genre: sacred and profane, the living and the dead, landscape and place, ancient beliefs and the modern imagination, birth and rebirth. Eerie Pageantry is curated by Aaron Lister and Dr Chelsea Nichols as part of their project Curator of Screams which explores connections between contemporary art and horror films.
We’re looking forward to the mutually enriching experience of seeing the folk horror classic, The Wicker Man in the glorious Embassy Theatre before digging deeper into the ways that folk horror have influenced Robinson and Driver’s work in Eerie Pageantry.