3203 SE Woodstock Blvd. Portland, Oregon, USA 97202
13 September – 18 December 2025
Presented by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Freddie Robins: Apotropaic is the first one-person exhibition by celebrated UK textile artist Freddie Robins, Professor of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, London.
Over the last several decades, textile artist Freddie Robins has earned a reputation as a radical conceptualist whose hand- and machine-made tapestries, sculptures, and chimerical assemblages are as playfully cheeky as they are political. Robins came of age during second-wave feminism. Like fellow British artists Sarah Lucas and Greyson Perry, Robins has joyfully labored to free textile art—and knitting in particular—from forms of sentimentality devoid of critique. Robins was a teen when Punk hit the streets and ripped apart fashion, suturing the wounds with safety pins. Titles of earlier works such as Bad Mother and Craft Kills speak to the cultural upheavals that have fueled Robins’ rebellious expressionism, and shifted the art-craft divide into the rearview mirror.
In British culture, knitting’s persistent nostalgia remains inseparable from the country’s self-image as a society in which duty and emotional restraint are social values transcending class. The WWII slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” is alive and well, emblazoned on millions of mass-produced objects, from coffee mugs to underwear. While Robins embraces the subterfuge of kitsch, repression is nowhere in her artistic vocabulary. The union of artificial and natural materials in her work creates an unease reflected in every global discount store.
Robins has consistently drawn our attention to the manner in which, under imperialist capitalism, the social ground of aesthetic taste seeks to establish as universal, aesthetic, and cultural practices that are the result of privilege. Hand-knit garments embody both the hedonism of consumer luxury, and the deprivation of economic precarity. For Robins, knitting is a multisensory research practice—a never-ending source of information and reflection. In the artist’s words: “Knitting is my way of interpreting and coming to terms with the world that I inhabit. It sits between my internal world, and the physical world, like a form of comfort or rather discomfort. My knitting practice questions conformity and notions of normality. I use knitting to explore contemporary gender and the human condition.”
The title of the exhibition—Apotropaic—is an ancient Greek adjective meaning something that “turns away from,” or “averts,” and it signifies objects that possess the ability to deflect ill intention and instill protection. The “evil eye” is a familiar apotropaic symbol from ancient Egypt, where it existed as the Eye of Horus—the Egyptian deity with the head of a falcon. Horus brought safety and healing to supplicants; and representations of the g-d’s eye have been discovered under the linen wrappings of mummified pharaohs. Before ancient Egyptians created the apotropaic symbols we live with today, Neanderthals carved thatched line-forms into the magical areas of their caves; and in rural England, from the Middle Ages to Victorian times, villagers embedded bundles of talismanic objects under the floorboards and in the walls of their dwellings. Contemporary capitalism, on the other hand, can only market, but never authentically inhabit, spiritual experience and authentic care. The global phenomenon of the Hilma af Klint exhibition is a clear indication of our thirst for a more meaningful way forward.
In Apotropaic, many of Robins’ recent assemblages are composed of the soft and, at times, unwieldy remains of other projects, coupled with found stones and other natural objects, as well as treasures from her vast collection of things past. Old toys, dolls, amulets, pipes, office supplies, and other ritual curiosities meander through Robins’ home in an internal alleyway of large, glass-fronted cases resembling wardrobes. The space feels like a portal as well as the habitat of Robins’ creatures, like the three knitted horses in the exhibition, with pareidolic rocks for heads. These small, irresistible equines conjure our desire to care for the endangered; and Robins offers them to us as emotional-support companions. Gazing upon their softness arouses a dreamy return to childhood. Absorbing Robins’ work slows our perception of time, and as we concede to knitting’s temporality, an internalized softness ensues—the supple experience of attention. Taken from Cooley Gallery
Apotropaic is curated by Stephanie Snyder, Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Cooley Gallery, and organized by Kris Cohen, Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities.
Freddie Robins comes to Reed as a Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts. The program was established by Edward and Sue Cooley and John and Betty Gray, in honor of art historian Dr. Stephen E. Ostrow, for his role in designing the Cooley Gallery, and for supporting the teaching of art history as part of the humanities. The Ostrow program brings to campus creative people who are distinguished in connection with the visual arts and who will provide a forum for conceptual exploration, challenge, and discovery.
Photography: Douglas Atfield and Mario Gallucci
Reed College – Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program
Cooley Gallery
