Catriona Robertson
Overview
“My work explores how the ecology is interconnected with materials and this idea of a future geology made up of waste materials, toxic chemicals, landfill and effects of excavation, and how living in the city we have become disconnected with nature, surrounded by synthetic environments and confined by spaces." - Catriona Robinson
Catriona's sculpture and installation work explores architecture and the monumental; ruins of buildings, void spaces interwoven with the fast changing rising concrete landscape. She is conscious of the afterlife of a material itself, considering waste, it’s reclamation, recycling and degradation. Using a combination of construction and discarded recycled materials, she creates situations in which her sculptures are either suggestive of a form of destruction, or are gradually being destroyed in the process of making. Fragments of previous sculptures become the aggregate for the next in a constant regurgitative flux, forming layers of synthetic sediments in a material journey. Working site-responsively, she uses subsequent detritus materials, making and un-making the work in the same space, in a performative interaction between the object, audience and site.
These objects she makes relate to her own body and her extended reach, through modular construction, playing with scale and weight. As the structures grow, sometimes in and out of my control, a performative navigation emerges as they take on a life of their own. They squeeze into awkward spaces and climb higher beyond my reach, in an attempt to escape from the space that they were made.
Biography
Catriona Robertson is a British/Scottish artist based in London. She graduated from a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2010, and an MFA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2019. In 2022, she received the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors. In 2021 she won second prize, UK New Artist of the Year, awarded by UK New Artists, Robert Walters Group and the Saatchi Gallery and was a SET Studio Prize winner. In the same year, she won the Lambeth Council Economic Resilience Grant and the Acme Studios Artist Relief Award. In 2020, she was awarded the Freelands Foundation Emergency Fund.
She has undertaken multiple residencies including the Muse Gallery 269 Artist in Residence (London, 2021-22), the Studio & Research Residency at Proposition Studios (London, 2020), the Koppel Project Campus Residency (London, 2020), and the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Residency at Standpoint Gallery (London, 2020).
Selected recent exhibitions include: Winter Show (The Muse Gallery, London, 2022), UK New Artists of the Year curated by Garth Gratrix (The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2021), Pigeon Park (Manor Place, London, 2021), The Factory Project curated by Thorp-Stavri (London, 2021), Terra Nexus curated by Gabriella Sonabend (Proposition Studios Southbank, London, 2021), A Sculpture of Site an Object of Play (Standpoint Gallery, London. 2020).
Exhibitions
Works
