Catriona Robertson

In this month's Mixing It Up, artist Catriona Robertson shares what she looks for in a site when she starts a new project, her best experience in the artworld and her top 3 curators/galleries.

Catriona Robertson 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, where gargantuan worm-like creatures have adapted to digest these synthetic materials excavating and re-constructing.

On the edge of collapse and precarity her sculptures burrow and bury themselves, digging into the ground and carving pathways into up into the ceiling. Tunnelling through in-between spaces, they re-emerge with a new hardened stone-like shell. 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 sculptural collage, the materials become an aggregate medium, as if forming a synthetic marble from plasticised concrete.

Catriona Robertson is a London based British / Scottish artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture in 2019. Catriona was recently nominated for the ‘Women of the Year’ award 2023. In 2022 she won the Gilbert Bayes Award selected by the Royal Society of Sculptors and was selected as the winner of the Benson Sedgwick Metalworking Residency for 2023. In 2021 she was Runner Up, Second Prize UK New Artist of the Year with an inaugural exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery supported by Robert Walters Group, and was a free Studio Prize winner at SET Woolwich. In 2020 the Standpoint Gallery selected her for a Graduate Residency, supported by the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award.

Catriona was recently commissioned by the Saatchi Gallery to create an ambitious public sculpture for the Chelsea Flower Show in May 2023, and most recently a solo exhibition at the Art House in Wakefield with a public sculpture ‘Gigantic Pile’ on the roof and at the entrance of the building.