Todd Robinson & Justin Trendall

Vestiges & Vignettes

04 - 27 June 2026

Printemps/été 2000

03 -31 August 2024

Vestiges & Vignettes is an exhibition of works by Justin Trendall and Todd Robinson. It includes a series of works produced by each artist.

In this, their second collaborative show at Void_Melbourne,  Justin Trendall and Todd Robinson have once again used a shared interest in textiles , applied arts, and historical consciousness as a bridge between their practices.

And once again it is the material difference between the mediums they use that provides the exhibition with its primary axis: the patinated bronze and raw aluminium casts of clothing and accessories that form the core of Robinson’s practice contrast and resonate with the ephemeral materiality of Trendall’s screen-printed fabric works. This time, however, the rigid symmetry of their previous hang has been softened by the inclusion of a more eclectic range of pieces. In this iteration, the works move away from a simple division based on authorship toward a more constellational approach, forming a series of couplings that allow individual pieces to enter into discrete conversations with one another.

Despite this change in the way the show presents as a whole, much continues to resonate conceptually with their earlier exhibition. Once again, it is fabric — both as a material and as a vehicle for cultural expression — that forms the key reference point for their practices and the works on display.

For Robinson, garments operate as sculptural traces or physical imprints of bodies, labour, and lived experience. Through the casting process, clothing becomes a material index of personal and cultural history, oscillating between legibility and illegibility. Holes, gaps, seams, and fragmentary elements are deliberately retained and emphasised, allowing absence, wear, and fault to remain visible within the work. Trendall’s fabric works similarly engage with processes of accumulation, repetition, and surface, using printed textiles to evoke shifting relationships between memory, pattern, and cultural transmission.

Together, the works in Vestiges & Vignettes consider fabric not simply as material, but as a carrier of history: something capable of holding traces of use, memory, identity, and time.

Todd Robinson creates evocative sculptures that invite tactile, visceral, and emotional responses from audiences. His work plays with ambiguous representations of materials and forms, challenging expected material behaviours and relationships. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions and projects in Australia, China, Europe, and USA. His works are held in the public collections of Ipswich Art Gallery, Queensland; National Gallery of Victoria; ARTBANK; and Woollahra Council. He lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia.

Justin Trendall is a contemporary artist based in Sydney, working on Gadigal land. He received an MVA from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney in 1994. Since graduating he has produced an extensive body of work which has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Focussing on connections between history and cultural identity his practice explores ways in which the complex and dynamic nature of our relationship to the past can be visually represented. Best known for his ‘cultural maps’, an ongoing series of large scale fabric prints, he has also produced bodies of work that take up these same themes through the mediums of ceramics, photography and Lego. The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of NSW, Monash University and the National Gallery of Australia all hold his work in their collections