Catriona Robertson at The Muse Gallery 269 Portobello Road W11 1LR until
20 October 2024.www.themuseat269.com – prices range from £20 to several
thousand.
An interesting background story to the creation of these works of art…read
on… Catriona is fascinated by the idea of the urban landscape as a collage. She is inspired by how over time architecture forms an urban geology where layers of history are built on top of foundations. Her work responds to the
interconnectedness of nature and the city as a landscape resulting in sculptures that embody an architectural imprint. There is a subterranean network of hidden cities beneath us, organic intertwined with inorganic. By covering the ground in concrete, tar and bitumen, we are disrupting the ecological cycle as these inorganic materials degrade at different rates with little or no nutritional benefit to the earth. Her use of re-claimed and re-cycled materials reflect on our throw-away culture, where the bedrock beneath the future city will be made up of detritus and past human relics rapidly compressed to form a new transient sedimentary layer in deep time. Robertson imagines a post-human future which nature will come back through the cracks as the concrete breaks down and where gargantuan worm-like creatures have adapted to digest these synthetic materials.
Her sculptures burrow and bury themselves, digging into the ground and into
the ceiling. Tunnelling through in-between spaces, they re-emerge with a new
hardened stone-like shell. On the edge of collapse and precarity she performs a ritual of breakage in her process, pulping materials to their core fibres. By
squeezing, cracking and blending these opposing elements into a collage, soft
textiles start to ooze between the gaps in the facade, as if forming a synthetic
marble from plasticised concrete.
Artist Statement:
Catriona is fascinated by the idea of the urban landscape as a collage. She is
inspired by how over time architecture forms an urban geology where layers of
history are built on top of foundations. Her work responds to the
interconnectedness of nature and the city as a landscape resulting in sculptures that embody an architectural imprint. There is a subterranean network of hidden cities beneath us, organic intertwined with inorganic. By covering the ground in concrete, tar and bitumen, we are disrupting the ecological cycle as these inorganic materials degrade at different rates with little or no nutritional benefit to the earth. Her use of re-claimed and re-cycled materials reflect on our throw-away culture, where the bedrock beneath the future city will be made up of detritus and past human relics rapidly compressed to form a new transient sedimentary layer in deep time. Robertson imagines a post-human future which nature will come back through the cracks as the concrete breaks down and where gargantuan worm-like creatures have adapted to digest these synthetic materials. Her sculptures burrow and bury themselves, digging into the ground and into the ceiling. Tunnelling through in-between spaces, they re-emerge with a new
hardened stone-like shell. On the edge of collapse and precarity she performs a ritual of breakage in her process, pulping materials to their core fibres. By
squeezing, cracking and blending these opposing elements into a collage, soft
textiles start to ooze between the gaps in the facade, as if forming a synthetic
marble from plasticised concrete.
Biography
Catriona Robertson is a Scottish/British artist living in London. Catriona
graduated from the Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture in 2019. Catriona was
commissioned by the Saatchi Gallery to create an immersive garden at the
Chelsea Flower Show, 2023 in collaboration with David Green Gardens,
exploring the re-wilding of future urban landscapes and re-imagining post –
human ecologies. Following this ambitious work she was nominated for
Women of the Year 2023 and was invited to exhibit ‘Gigantic Pile’ at the Art
House in Wakefield. She won the Gilbert Bayes Award, Royal Society of
Sculptors 2022 and was selected for the Benson-Sedgwick Metalwork
Residency in 2023. In 2021 she was awarded the Second Prize UK New Artist
of the Year with an inaugural exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery supported by
Robert Walters Group.
Catriona is also interested in multi-faith discipline and is currently studying this interesting subject.
Penny Nair Price