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Artist Statement
My practice is committed to a cyclical process which straddles sculpture, drawing, painting and performance. I jump between spaces of the personal and the shared by crossing back and forth between inner and outer landscapes. I find a power in this way of working which results in ongoing abstract drawings and paintings, sculptures (indoor and outdoor) and video works - which all occupy space in different ways whether its in a gallery, on the street or in the open air of a ‘natural’ environment. The gaps I jump over when navigating different environments and mediums relate conceptually and spiritually with spaces left empty by oppressive systems which have caused fractures in our Queer histories and experience. Our shared ground has been unstable and we as a community have learned to take huge leaps, to dance and to make our own types of homes and bases. I traverse these chasms and schisms in order to make new connections between body and mind and body and environment/landscape. The works I make are connected to natural cycles and respond specifically to site. Works are made over a period of time that spans seasons and depends on adapting to changes in tide, weather, natural forces and light. I embed methods of automatism in creative processes in order to provide a space for physical memory and a connection with varying types of consciousness. The idea of a ‘raincoat layer’ of the body as borrowed from lesbian and trans activist Les Feinberg’s revolutionary novel Stone Butch Blues continues to be a core concern which centres the space between inner landscapes and external forces. The idea of the expanded figure and the expanded field of sculpture offers a space of freedom in order to depart from rigid and binary understandings of the figure. Plurality is celebrated with a focus that shifts from one thing to the next as if shuttling through the decades of back and forth oppression and liberation or providing a glimpse of the next cove around the next outcrop of rock.
Bio
Ro Robertson (they/them) (b. 1984, Sunderland, UK) is based at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, West Cornwall. Their practice spans sculpture, drawing, painting and video, mediums through which they explore the boundaries of the human body and its environment.
Finding inspiration in the ever-shifting flux of the tidal zone, Robertson centres their practice around the power of fluidity. Robertson often works site-specifically, conjuring multi-sensory experiences as a response to locations and landscapes. This approach informs their works on paper, which begin with the artist recalling sensations and memories associated with particular places and working intuitively to create an ecosystem of layered pools, washes and lines of pigment. Rather than describe a landscape, Robertson’s visceral palette evokes an overall sense of a place, with colours that might suggest, for instance, the sensation of the sun drying salt water on skin. Meditative video works which include performance for camera and audio-visual collage situate the body in relation to the natural environment, often positioning a ‘base layer’ of clothing as an interface between body and external forces.
Sculpture, both small- and large-scale, is crucial to their practice. Robertson often starts a sheet-metal sculpture with a line drawing, which they use to create Constructivist-like forms that balance a sense of freedom with mathematical precision. Welding, a physical and dangerous process, creates a connection between their family’s shipbuilding heritage and modern and contemporary sculptural practices. Rather than the unified figure associated with traditional sculptural form, Robertson creates multi-part sculptures with an abundance of negative space, breaking down binaries by expressing ideas around the extended or collective body.
Robertson is currently included in a major exhibition of the work of constructivist Marlow Moss titled Creating Space: The Constructivist Marlow Moss at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin with Leonor Antunes, Tacita Dean, Florette Dijkstra and Ro Robertson which includes the artist’s first outdoor sculpture in Europe. Robertson’s first institutional solo exhibition, The Ribs Begin to Rise, opened at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, in 2025. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Sea State, a two-person exhibition with Maggi Hambling at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk; Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, The Hepworth Wakefield, touring to The Box, Plymouth, and Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; and Modern Thresholds: Ro Robertson, Tate St Ives. Additional recent group exhibitions have taken place at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; and Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds. Public sculpture installations include Drench at the Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park, Norwich and Frieze Sculpture 2022 as well as Stone (Butch) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Robertson’s work is held in the collections of Arts Council England, The Government Art Collection, Leeds Art Gallery, York Art Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the British Museum, the Sainsbury Centre and The Hepworth Wakefield.
Videos
Studio International Interview (30 mins)
Text excerpts
Ro Robertson: Unsettled Shifting Boundaries and Permanent Flux by Eleanor Clayton (introduction to Skinny Dip monograph)
In 2022, Ro Robertson was described as ‘an artist already recognised as an important voice of their generation’ 1 . Intervening years have seen their work featured in exhibitions across the UK and acquired by major public collections, culminating this year in their first solo exhibition in a public gallery. Their work has been celebrated individually, brought into dialogue with iconic modern artists, and included alongside their peers in shows articulating the diversity of queer experiences… Their work is both complex and immediate, conceptual yet undeniably physical. While speaking to the contemporary political moment, echoes of the past abound, connecting to disparate art and societal histories. Their work is very specific – referencing queer culture and their working-class roots – yet at the same time offers universal points of connection; to the land, to ourselves, and to each other.
Video interview and review for Studio International by Juliet Rix
Ro Robertson is having a moment. The artist, whose practice includes sculpture, large-scale drawing, video and installations, has work in four exhibitions across England. One of them, The Ribs Begin to Rise at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art is their first solo institutional show and marks Robertson’s return to their hometown of Sunderland.
Burlington Contemporary Profile by Kirsty White
As such, it is perhaps more meaningful to accept Robertson’s practice on thematic terms: in its focus on nature, the climate crisis and the limits of human action. Often drawing attention to the transitional, in-between spaces that occur naturally in our environment, Robertson suggests a way forwards that relies on plurality – a necessity if humankind is to look beyond the earth as a resource to be mined for our convenience.
ABSTRACT BODIES by Matthew Cheale (text from Torsos solo exhibition at Maximillian William, London)
Like Robertson’s drawings, their sculptures are anti-mimetic, creating the impression of a body rather than an exact likeness. Biomorphic and leggy forms are upright and frontal, with features almost painterly in their texture and garments, stretched like canvas, in spaces that your body might occupy. Robertson quite regularly underscores anthropomorphic references with blatantly figural titles, such as ‘torso’, ‘between two bodies’ and ‘stone (butch)’. But there is something else at play, too, something devious. Like Sarah Lucas and Senga Nengudi, whose borrowings from everyday life – white vests and stuffed pantyhose – pushed bawdy, ballsy bodily associations into the expanded field of sculpture, Robertson mines the bodily and sculptural semantics garments can be made to convey.