Solo Exhibition
Catriona Robertson
PV - 26th September 6-9pm
We are living in a human-made landscape, where few truly wild places remain.
In the urban forest, Nature finds a way to grow around humans shifting in order to survive. Undulating beneath the tarmac like magma, lichens latch onto brick walls, small meadows grow over verges and fronds reach out through crevices.
Precarious and appearing on the edge of collapse, Robertson’s sculptures adapt in response to their surrounding environment. They burrow and bury themselves, digging into the ground, carving out pathways up into the ceiling — a precursor of a post-human future in which Nature will come back through the cracks, as concrete breaks down and makes way for something new, submerged underwater.
Gargantuan worm-like creatures have evolved to digest the urban strata created by the Anthropocene - synthetic materials that have been compressed over time, excavating new age sediments and reconstructing future architectures.Tunnelling through in-between spaces, Robertson's Amorphous forms re-emerge with a newly hardened stone-like shell, like fossils unearthed from the crust, meeting the air for the first time in millennia.
There is a subterranean network of hidden cities vibrating beneath our feet, where the organic and inorganic are inextricably intertwined as hybrid forms. By covering the ground in concrete, tar and bitumen, we are disrupting rhythm of natural ecological cycles, with little or no benefit to the earth and disconnecting ourselves from the terra underfoot. In living human memory, the world has changed at an accelerated rate. What will the monuments of the future be made of ?
