Contact:
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cat@catrionarobertson.co.uk
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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.
Selected Commissions, Awards and Residencies:
2023 – Women of the Year
2023- Saatchi Gallery Garden Commision at Chelsea Flower Show 2023, supported by HSBC
2023 – The Art House, Wakefield, public sculpture until April 2024
2023 – Benson Sedgwick Residency, Essex, selected by the Royal Society of Sculptors
2022 – Ingram Prize , curated by Jo Baring.
2022 – Artist Newsletter Bursary , Time Money Space
2022 – Gilbert Bayes Award, Royal Society of Sculptors
2021 – Second Prize, Runner up UK New Artist of the Year, awarded by Robert Walters Group and supported by the Saatchi Gallery.
2021 – SET Studio Prize winner, Woolwich
2021-22 – Muse Gallery 269 selected as Artist in Residence
2021- Lambeth Council Economic Resilience Grant
2021 – Shortlisted for Arts and Heritage, Pontefract Castle Commision
2020 – Studio & Research Residency – Proposition Studios, Peckham, London
2021 – Acme Studios Artist relief award
2020 – Freelands Foundation Emergency Fund
2020 – Resident at the Koppel Project Campus, Central Saint Martins, Holborn, London
2020 – Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Graduate Residency at Standpoint Gallery, London
2019 – Merz Gallery, Solo Residency, Creative Scotland , Sanquhar
2019 – Emerging Artist Award, British Council, Berlin, Germany
2018-19 – South Square Trust Bursary
2017-19 Oppenheim Downes Trust Bursary
2018 – Praksis Oslo, selected for funded place as International Artist in Residence,
2015 – Shiro Oni Studios, two month Residency in Onishi, Japan, supported by the REFRESH award by Central Saint Martins, London.
Selected Exhibitions:
2024 – Everyday Monuments – Saatchi Gallery
2023 – Flowers Gallery ‘MATTER’ curated by Jo Dennis, Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London.
2023 – A New Dawn, A New Day’ , Group exhibition including Mark Wallinger, Jeremy Dellar, Rana Begum, Erika Trotzig, Jacob Talkowski, Caroline Ashley, Rong Bao and Catriona Robertson, curated by Pallas Citroen at the Bomb Factory, Marylebone, London.
2023 – Chelsea Flower Show – Solo exhibition presented by Saatchi Gallery
2023 – Solo exhibition ‘Gigantic Pile’ Relics of the Future, the Art House, Wakefield.
2023 – Meat Market curated by Sophie Nowakowska (Professional Art Bullshitter).
2023 – Gilbert Bayes Award, Winners Show at the Royal Society of Sculptors, London and the Art House, Wakefield
2023 – Winter Sculpture Park Gallery no. 32, Bexley
2022 -Winter Show, Artists in residence,The Muse Gallery, London
2021 – ‘UK New Artists of the Year’, curated by Garth Gratrix at The Saatchi Gallery, London
2021 – ‘Underlay’ Solo Installation commisioned by SET Sudios, Woolwich
2021 – ‘Pigeon Park’, Manor Place, London
2021 – ‘The Factory Project’, curated by Thorp-Stavri, Woolwich, This is Projekt London
2020-2021 – ‘WYRM’ at ‘Terra Nexus’ , curated by Gabriella Sonabend, Proposition Studios Southbank, London
2020 – ‘A Sculpture of Site an Object of Play’ at Standpoint Gallery, London UK
2019 – ‘Sugar Mountain’ – The Silver Building, curated by Thorp-Stavri, London, UK
2019 – ‘This Way That Way’ – Solo exhibition, The Merz Gallery , Sanquhar, supported by Creative Scoltland
2019 – ‘Graduate Show’ at the Royal College of Art, London, UK
2019 – ‘Emerging Artist Award’, Liebermann Villa, British Council Berlin, Germany
2019 – ‘Marketing Suite’, Assembly Point, London, UK
2018 – Merz Barn -Lake District, Litterol Trust, Public Sculpture
Press:
Saatchi Gallery Chelsea Flower Show reveal 2023 – and press release with garden images
FAD Magazine interview for solo show
UK New Artists of the Year Award
Art plugged – UK New Artist of the year
FAD Magazine review by Paul Carey-Kent The Factory Project October 2021
Floorr Magazine Issue 25, interview by Simek Shropshire, July 2020
SOS; Sculptors on Sculpture; online lockdown publication, interview by Josh C Wright, May 2020
Reviews
Show 2019 School of Arts & Humanities: Expanding Traditions, Disciplines and Media
‘There are attempts to disentangle sculpture from the confines of its modernist legacy while, also understanding how that legacy can function as a critical tool of enquiry. Influenced by Kurt Schwitters, and a residency at the merzbahn, for Catriona Robertson, a possible answer comes with the notion of the deconstructed ruin‘
Review by Jesse Bond. 28 June 2019
Imagination and Brave Acts: Arts & Humanities Work-in-progress 2018
‘There’s an obsessive collection of lost culture and a bathos to the imagination of what might survive us. Catriona Robertson distorts object and form, recasting columns into twisted, weathered shapes that loom precariously as if relics of a natural disaster.‘
Review by Octavia Reeve. 19 January 2018
Praksis Oslo – Monumental Temporal residency
‘ Her sculptures create an opposition of material and surface – forming tension and fragility, whilst questioning the permanence of the material against traditional sculptural practices‘
