Catriona Robertson MRSS

Catriona Robertson is a Scottish/British artist living in London. Catriona graduated from the Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture. Catriona has recently won the Gilbert Bayes Award at the Royal Society of Sculptors 2022 and won Second Prize UK New Artist of the Year Award 2021 hosted by the Saatchi Gallery. 

My sculpture and installation explores architecture and the monumental; ruins of buildings and how nature is interwoven with the fast changing rising concrete landscape.

I am conscious of the afterlife of a material and its effect on the environment, researching urban geology, subterranean networks and the anthropocene imagining what future synthetic sediment is being created with plastic, toxic chemicals, domestic and construction site waste being absorbed into the ground, buried and eroded over time.

Working site-responsively I use collected detritus materials making and un-making the work in a regurgitative flux, as a performative interaction between the object audience and site. These monolithic assemblages take over a space involuntarily, often trying to hide or squeeze themselves into the void spaces to get out of the room or the window that they are growing too big for. The amalgamated cast surfaces reveal layers of repurposed construction site and domestic waste; paper, plastic packaging, newspaper, metal, cardboard, that become the aggregate of a stone-like surface as a sculptural collage in an architectural assemblage. These are set with cement, concrete, plaster, clay and paper-pulp forming an imprint of a synthetic fossilised sediment or excavated slab of a ruin or piece of architecture. The unfinishedness of these materials suggests a temporality and fragility of their making as a imagined synthetic marble or stone surface. What new aggregates are the new monuments of the future made of, pliable, plastic, concrete, a marble of precarity?