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Gill Robertson

Associate Member

My work explores the disappearance of the physical world and moments between memory, consciousness and oblivion. The painting process alternates between layering and erasion as successive images develop.

Landscape figures in a number of ways:
The experience of 'being in the landscape' provides the inspiration to paint and the process always begins with a desire to capture the sense of being on a threshold.

Landscape images also appear in the painting process. Recent work has focused on images from seas, swamps and still water, and places between two worlds. The final surface of the painting often comes to represent the reflective surface of water.

Landscape also has a material and symbolic influence in that the working with painting materials in some way replicates activities of pouring water, and the moulding and scraping away of earth. (I was once an archaeologist). The liquid becomes very important in the later stages of the painting.

Drawings and photographs are used throughout, partly for recording but also in the development of and experimentation with new images.

A key interest is in exploring how photography shapes how we see and represent the landscape, and in using this understanding to develop the depth and meaning of the painting (but not developing painting as photographic replication).

19 November 2002

Education

BA (Hons) Visual Art
BA( Hons) Latin/Greek
PhD (Organizational Behaviour)

Current research

MA (Painting), Winchester School of Art

Indicative Publications

None as yet but final year dissertation developed a new perspective on the work of Therese Oulton and Prunella Clough

Publications

  • 2000
    • 'Dialogue in Place', Joyce Lyon and Andrea Thoma, Published by Bretton Hall College of the University of Leeds in association with the University of Minnesota.

Fine Art Practice

Oil on canvas

Selected Exhibitions

  • 2005
    • LAN2D Beyond Landscape? Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK
  • 2002
    • WSA Degree Show
  • 2002
    • New Greenham Arts
  • 2002
    • Pond Galleries

 

Gill Robertson

e-mail: gbrl02@soton.ac.uk