Knowing we are water
- Martin Holman
- May 14
- 9 min read
Words by Martin Holman | Artworks By Ro Robertson
In their exploration of the boundaries between landscape and people, artist Ro Robertson gives shape to the forces in nature that unite us.
With solo presentations since 2019 at Tate St Ives and the Hepworth in Wakefield, participation in significant group shows around the country and exposure at one of London’s leading new commercial galleries, Ro Robertson is fast being recognised as one of the most interesting people at present making sculpture in Britain. Taking sculpture off the pedestal of the grand and the mighty, this artist investigates echoes in the personal and intimate of the forces in the natural world that shape us.
Water has been a factor in Robertson’s life from earliest days. Growing up in Sunderland near the River Wear, for the past five years they have lived and worked on the coast of West Penwith, years when the critical limelight has fallen upon an unfolding singular vision.
Like the tides and rocky shores that this artist regularly walks and swims between, Robertson’s approach is animated by transitoriness – in material properties of steel, stone, in drawing and colour as well as in notions of meaning and implication. Within objects and the large-scale paintings on paper that are frequently shown together, lines radiate without seeming to settle, in a kind of continuity between media, and between three-dimensionality and the flat.
The installation “Modern Thresholds” on show at Tate St Ives plays out how Robertson makes these resonant connections visible. In the curved glazed gallery that overlooks the beach and sea at Porthmeor, two unframed images in gouache (an opaque, water-based paint), pencil and watercolour evoke the colours of the scene outside. The gathering of ballooning outlines and dripping rivulets of pigment seems held by an act of will alone from spontaneously changing before our eyes into another arrangement.
The dynamism of water creating patterns on sand as it advances then retreats finds a graphic parallel in these works, called “Porth I and II” (2023). Less about a specific place, scale or gravity than an idea of liquidness and motion, they correspond to the steel structures in front, both sitting on low, wedge-shaped museum plinths above the slate tiled floor. The various curved metal facets that make up each section of “Interlude I” (2023) seem to face each other across the gap that separates them as if they want to fold together. Yet they stay apart and the viewer instead gravitates naturally into the space between them to feel momentarily immersed in that impending cascade.
The effect maybe touches memories of watching waves pulled into a crevice by the pulse of the current, or even of dipping into water as it shoots up into arcs between hard surfaces before withdrawing like an expulsion of breath back into the billows. Nature abhors a straight line so the contours of Robertson’s objects undulate restlessly, suggesting different sightlines or shifts in shape, shadow and tonality. The allusion to sea is compelling, and the colours support that reading. But the link is not concrete; strong abstract sensations of implied movement are more insistent. And the body – of the sculpture as well as the onlooker – somehow feels enclosed by this reluctance to contain a single identity.
Actions by the body in nature are the source of Robertson’s formulations. Whether drawn in pencil or shaped by bending thin sheets of metal, the shapes resemble gestures caught in an instant by the shutter of a camera before they change. The composite sculpture “Drench” (2022) substitutes rigid Corten steel for the malleable metal of “Interlude” that is so thin it might quiver.
Inspired by watching the coastline submerged and exposed by successive tides, five elements rise like steps in height and slanting angle from individual bases flat on the ground. Yet these are not directly representations of landscape; the scope of allusions is wide, so that echoes co-exist of other matters. Planes and shapes in these sculptures offer the viewer spaces to slip into, imaginatively if not always physically, to find alternative other narratives lying there. A comparison might be with spoken words, open script or a thought floating up in the mind for an instant and then vanishing.
Similarly, the uprights in “Drench” recall Celtic standing stones, such the mythic circles of this region, agile divers or figures in a dance. As humans, we are always concocting theories about how the world works and how we fix people into categories within it. This sculpture’s theme, though, is movement and the body provides the key. For the body and the world, in all their complexities, are seen as indissolubly part of the same transient experience. Conceived for outdoors, colours on every surface of “Drench” in paint and rusted metal imply the organic tones of rock, beach and sea meshed in the flow and ebb of energy. Depending on the direction it is seen from, the outline mounts in crescendo like sound or falls away in a diminuendo.
Robertson’s visual language evolved by treating their own body as tool and material. That was aided by their background in performance. After all, actions are sculptural, the ephemeral dimension of an artform at odds with its two abiding qualities of permanence and monumentality. Robertson resists both with explorations that started with immaterial space and assembling sounds. They largely took place in Manchester where Robertson moved to study at the city’s art school, graduating in 2010 and continuing to work there and then in West Yorkshire until relocating to Cornwall.
In Manchester Robertson learned how to use materials and assess their potential for a particular type of expression through performance and not construction. The first public projects involved manipulating hard matter like metal in the manner of an instrument, striking it with objects as if to wring a non-verbal voice from it.
Within the city’s diverse and experimental art, music and LGBT communities, settings for performances were often improvised from vacant office blocks and shops and initially known to few – ideal incubators for fresh approaches. Stepping out into a highly creative arena for Robertson called equally upon tapping into self as object as well as on stuff, a layered perspective on making that has not changed.
All artists observe the world and consider how the world sees them. As a queer and non-binary artist, Robertson has a claim to focus on that exchange, which is historically coloured by prejudice when established precepts are questioned. Describing “Drench” as the “terrain of the queer body”, Robertson confounds with exhilaration attitudes built upon outdated inflexibilities in belief.
Titles can underline that: “Stone (Butch)” (2021), identifying one of their first public sculptures (displayed in the City of London), cites author Leslie Feinberg’s defiant novel “Stone Butch Blues” (1993) about New York’s Lesbian community. “I jump between spaces of the personal and the shared,” Robertson has written, “by crossing back and forth between inner and outer landscapes.” Just as the landscape is the definition of natural beauty, so too is the body in all its forms and diversity. The elements they are exposed to are not all climatic.
Taking their performances outdoors where they existed in photographs or video helped to transform Robertson’s practice. Curiously, it is in stills and images that we first see the emergence of their purpose in sculpture - locating the core of an artwork in gaps and crevices in nature, the place of utmost change and possibility in nature. Robertson carried their materials on long walks to record these interactions. Camera and performance props soon became materials with which they could cast that fertile void between obdurate rocks into an object to show elsewhere, leading to “Between Two Bodies” (2020).
Using Jesmonite, a synthetic mix of sedimentary rock powder and water-based acrylic resin, which can be poured on site, this remarkable form transposes the empty cleft into a positive form. At the same time, the dense rocks that shrouded it are dematerialised into slender open metal supports. The void becomes a skin with overtones of soft tissue in orifices, the points in the body that engage with the outer world, receiving and expelling it.
Skin is an analogy that Robertson’s sculpture investigates. All matter has a surface. In stone it holds in billions of constructive crystals. As the body’s largest organ, skin is criss-crossed by millions of sensory receptors. It also layers the body, so that in this sculpture, iridescent colour suggests raiment in precious fabric.
Clothing is both public as the surface that others see and intimate, masking the true natural self. In sculptures serially titled “Torso” (2021), Robertson acknowledges these functions, incorporating genderless garments (a vest, shorts). They are casually draped on steel forms. The painted steel “Trickster Figures” (2022-23) are neatly cut into contrasting swollen ellipses and slender fluted columns that recall rock pools and tight, empty crevices.
Robertson’s movement into sculpture followed a pause to review and precipitated an accelerated technical learning curve. One step seemed to unlock ideas that called upon new methods. Plate steel supplanted lightweight rolled steel to withstand showing outdoors; angle grinders and water-jet cutting was added to folding and bending by hand; welding became a skill, assisted as elsewhere by advice from other artists, who shared expertise. Crucial, however, was the knowledge gained since art school in how materials behave, so that each step taken was grounded on long-standing experience. Indeed, family history had played a part. Shipbuilding was integral to the identity of their native Sunderland until the 1980s, and to the livelihoods of its people. Robertson’s grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the industry and for generations before had been seafarers, a link their brother continues.
Their working-class history is immersed in labour; while the viewer need not know, the fact motivates Robertson. Their articulation of sculpture’s essences demonstrates it: they are not likeness or shape, but force, scale,weight and the material’s relationship with the body. Their great-grandfather was a “holder up” in the shipyard, the person in a team who placed red-hot rivets into the ribs that joined massive plates into the skin of a new vessel. Robertson’s latest London exhibition reflects on that heritage through their personal experience of making. Their first museum career retrospective will open in Sunderland in July.
Not every sculpture is painted, but many are. The process calls upon primer and marine paint designed to protect surfaces rather than embellish them, intended for industrial applications rather than painterly ones. The medium is stiff and unyielding, and Robertson adapts their technique to its characteristics. This results in bold shapes, but which retain the fluid linearity of the painting and drawing that have always been present in their practice.
Indeed, until they concentrated on performance in their third year as a Manchester undergraduate, painting was Robertson’s principal area. Their subjects were mostly figurative, including self-portraits. That figurative impulse has been stripped down since to an expressive abstraction built on spontaneous mark-making, a kind of automatic system that plugs into gestures detached from conscious control.
The works on paper, “Porth I and II” emerged in this way, supplemented in their drawing by the artist studying contours left in the sand by retreating waves and sometimes tracing them. The sea, after all, makes no plans before landing on the beach. Moreover, Robertson shapes their sculpture in a comparably improvised manner. The demands of jet-cutting steel, however, mean that these drawings are converted digitally into plans for the cutters to follow. Robertson then finishes the steels, sometimes incising drawings onto the surface, as in “Outer Body” (2023), a sentinel-like vertical with the spiky profile of a weapon or runic symbol, which was recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection.
Robertson describes the intensity of working as “entering an emotional space which puts everything into a flow. Everything goes quiet and I know it’s the final session. Time goes a bit weird. When now the sculpture exists as its own thing, parting follows. I have to remove myself from it and that’s hard.”
Barbara Hepworth worked not far from Robertson’s painting studio in St Ives. Her sculpture aimed for a unifying experience in the viewer, exploring organic forms that included negative space. Holes became connections. Through the clarity of their means, Ro Robertson’s work travels between levels of interpretation and through the conflicting distinctions humankind constructs. By treating these fragmentary impulses with frankness, they face the forces that shape the world.
As adept with poetry as with gesture, image and form, Robertson naturally harnesses the rhythms of words:
I shift inside from land to body now
reflect them, fold them, double them and repeat them
fumes and metal are trying to bond with me
The steel ensemble began to dance all at once,
and I am surrounded
I remove myself; I clean myself of you and you go*
* From “Interlude II” by Ro Robertson, poem published in Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, Thames and Hudson, 2024, pp. 190-1
Modern Thresholds: Ro Robertson at Tate St Ives is part of Modern Conversations (until December). The exhibition Holder Up continues at Maximillian William, 47 Mortimer Street, London W1, until 14 June 2025. Ro Robertson: The Ribs Begin to Rise takes place at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, 26th July – 6th December 2025.
