Carapace

As a kid I grew up on a farm in Queensland. Our house was built on a hill with large glass doors and windows looking across to a river. On hot summer nights hundreds of Christmas beetles of all sizes and colours would clamour against the glass. Sometimes one would manage to find its way inside and terrorise me by twisting itself into a frenzy in my long hair.
 
When I was 14 Beatlemania took hold. I filled an album with images of beetles alongside images of the Fab Four.

– Julie Rrap 

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Six bronze sculptures and a new video work form the foundation of Julie Rrap’s latest exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Carapace. Continuing her relentless engagement with the female form, Rrap presents a series of elegant, wall-mounted bronze sculptures cast from a mould of her own back. Each piece is finished with a distinct patina that remarkably mimics the subtle variations in human skin, down to the near-imperceptible undulations of veins beneath the skin’s surface. Visitors to the gallery are invited to engage in an extraordinary sensory experience, exclusive to this exhibition, allowing them to feel the warmth that might emanate from a living body, radiating from one uniquely heated sculpture.

In direct dialogue with the sculptures, a compelling new video work captures Rrap, filmed from above, as she crouches under the weight of one of these bronze forms, her arms and legs extending and contracting as she grapples with the literal and metaphorical burden of her own back. This video work continues the ideas explored in her major commissioned work, SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders)—a life-size bronze sculpture of Rrap standing on her own shoulders, seamlessly underscoring her forty-year history of using her body as both subject and object, and representing an unwavering exploration that resonates as powerfully today as it did four decades ago.

Carapace follows closely on the heels of Rrap’s acclaimed retrospective exhibition, Julie Rrap: Past Continuous, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which further solidifies her status as one of the country’s most compelling and important artists. 

– Tallulah Smith, 2024