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.
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.
BIO
RO ROBERTSON (they/them) (b. Sunderland 1984) is a contemporary artist based in West Cornwall.
Modern Thresholds: Ro Robertson, a site-responsive display of drawing and sculpture is currently on view at Tate St Ives until December 2025. Robertson’s public sculpture Drench, inspired by the energy of the tidal zone, was exhibited in Regent’s Park, London as part of Frieze Sculpture 2022 and is now on view at the Sainsbury Centre’s Sculpture Park. Robertson’s first public sculpture Stone (Butch) was installed at London’s iconic Gherkin skyscraper 2021-22, commissioned for the 10th edition of ‘Sculpture in the City’. Stone (Butch) is now installed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, where is it part of the permanent collection. Past solo presentations include Torsos, Maximillian William, London and Subterrane, Maximillian William, London. Past group exhibitions include WINK WINK at Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery, Rossendale; We Are Floating In Space, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, Newlyn / Penzance; TRICKSTER FIGURES: sculpture and the body curated by Jes Fernie at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; Behind abstract forms, Fragment, New York; On Queer Ground, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Seen, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange; Into Abstraction, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield and Exploratory Drawings, Maximillian William, London. Works by Robertson are also held in the collection of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, The Hepworth Wakefield and Leeds Museums & Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery). Robertson is currently participating in a group presentation at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley. In early 2024, Wakefield Council will unveil a newly commissioned monumental, site-specific work by Ro Robertson following four public sculpture commissions in Wakefield city by leading British artists.