New Acquisition supported by CAS featuring the work of Ro Robertson for York Art Gallery

Ro Robertson’s practice spans sculpture, drawing, painting and video, mediums through which to explore the boundaries of the human body and its environment. Robertson works in a site-specific way, often outdoors, with a multisensory focus on the body in the landscape. Unity between the material of the natural landscape and the body reclaims a space for LGBTQIA+ identity in the face of a history of its being deemed ‘against nature’. Physical explorations of the natural landscape feed into ‘automatic’ abstract drawings and short meditative video works. Robertson’s large-scale sculptures embed the fluidity of this cyclical practice into rigid and industrial materials such as Corten steel and marine paint. These materials create a bridge between the artist’s family heritage of shipbuilding and their sculptural practice.

Porth II (2021) is part of Interlude, an installation that brings together drawings and steel sculpture. It was commissioned by Tate St Ives in response to the unique position of the museum’s central sea-facing gallery, which overlooks Porthmeor Beach. Robertson used automatic techniques to draw freely and unconsciously en plein air directly on the beach, reflecting the ‘improvisation of the sea and the chance compositions it leaves behind’. Inspired by the tidal zone of the shoreline, which is submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide in the artist’s words ‘rewriting’ the beach twice a day – the drawing appears in flux. Titled with the musical term for a passage bridging two instrumental sections, Interlude addresses ideas of existing ‘in-between’, exploring meeting points between mind and body, body and land, land and sea, or rigid steel and fluid paint.

Inspired by York-born 19th-century painter William Etty and his innovative exploration of the nude figure, York Art Gallery has since 2012 expanded its collection of modern and contemporary art responding to the theme of the body. Robertson joins an ever-growing group of contemporary artists who are concerned with the relationship ;between the body and landscape, including  Jade de Montserrat and Phoebe Collings-James. Robertson also continues a tradition of artists working outdoors, in response to the elements, and this history can be traced through York’s collection. Echoing the coastal scenery that inspired it, Porth II oscillates between this tradition and an inner landscape that disrupts binary ideas around gender and nature.

Ro Robertson (b. 1984, Sunderland, UK) currently lives and works in West Cornwall. Solo exhibitions include Tate St Ives (2023); Maximillian William, London (2021, 2022); The Hepworth Wakefield (2019); and PAPER Gallery, Manchester (2018). Group exhibitions include Wolverhampton Art Gallery; York Art Gallery; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (all 2023); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2022 & 2019) and Newlyn Art Gallery; The Exchange, Penzance (2021).

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 2023/24