Catriona Robertson
“I like the idea that something monumental in scale can just disappear overnight…”
Interview by Simek Shropshire
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
My family is Scottish and from Northern England around Oldham, but I grew up in Surrey after they moved down from Aberdeen. My mum really encouraged me to do art and follow my ambition, so I moved to London to study my Foundation at Chelsea in Art and Design and then my BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. After graduation I wanted to save up some money to travel to Berlin so I got a job as a retail assistant for MYLA, a luxury lingerie company in London. After temping in the office one day the Creative Director found out I studied at CSM and that seemed to impress them, so they offered me a job designing their window displays and installations at their London stores and Harrods and Selfridges! It was a great experience but pretty full on. After a year I finally moved to Berlin for a few months to re-engage with my own practice.
I got a studio and did a lot of exploring of abandoned buildings and ruins of post war architecture. I came back to London and applied for a job working as a 3D Fabrication technician at Central Saint Martins in wood, metal and casting. I’ve learned so much there I really enjoy the teaching element. CSM funded me to do a residency in Japan which changed my whole practice and helped me to develop a portfolio for my Masters. I graduated from the Royal College of Art last year (2019) in Sculpture. My work really scaled up during the course and since then I've had some fantastic opportunities to do residencies in Norway, Scotland and at Standpoint gallery in London that have shaped the way I work site responsively.
Burrow - Sprout - Grow, Installation, 2019. RCA Degree show
What fascinates you about the processes of making and unmaking?
I think it has a lot to do with temporality and permanence of material, where sculpture can be made of something more instant or continues to transform. I draw on the aesthetic of ‘sculptural’ permanent materials - stone, marble and concrete, but I use other materials to create a stone-like effect - painted cardboard, and now paper-clay and paper-concrete that borrow from this monumentality, but I can re-use them in different configurations. I like the idea that something monumental in scale can just disappear overnight and using these more temporary elements allows for it to change and to work on a larger scale. I also work site responsively where I will make and un-make something in the same space using waste materials from the location. Sometimes I break down my old concrete cast sculptures and use the rubble to embed into a new surface, or I will re-use cladding and timber from different sculptures. I am a bit of a hoarder in that respect! But I usually find a way to reuse materials that are visible in the surfaces of my work and the structure in a regurgative like process.
I think that some of these ideas come from living in London seeing buildings demolished and quickly replaced. I'm always stopping to look at the amalgamated collage of historical buildings amongst new ones, the visible layers of history being built over like the Georgian facade kept and the rest demolished, becoming a geology of architecture. In Berlin I saw a lot of buildings in disrepair that I was fascinated by. I spent a long time seeking out post war concrete architecture or other strange concrete follies, above and underground. It made me think about erosion and the ruin, how something so monumental can be unmade if it is not preserved.
How do physical space and your audience’s experience of that space affect the performative language of your sculpture and installation works?
My interest in performance started during my Foundation and my BA, where during my degree show the audience were met with a room of precariously placed ceramic sculptures that were broken accidentally and deliberately in a performative act. My objects grew and I started to see them as props and installations, like a stage set and the audience became the unwitting performer. I invite the audience to look up or move around a space to see where the sculpture is going. It's creating that in-between moment where something is about to happen or has just happened that I’m curious about. Marcel Duchamp called it the ‘infra-thin’ ; the intangible, the mould from the cast, the glimmer of water, the smoke from the mouth.
I imagine my sculptures falling over or having moved somehow just before you enter the room and then frozen in a split second, a bit like in Toy story. I like the idea that my sculptures might be moving when the audience isn’t looking and that they create a sense of movement in their form, like something has happened or is about to. I don’t like the spotlight of performance though, it's more subtle than that. I’m drawn to awkward spaces, in-between or void spaces, dead spaces, windows, skylights and corners, between pillars, stages, lift shafts. At the Royal College of Art space was constantly an issue and I felt frustrated by these limitations, so I adapted my big sculptures to fit into spaces wherever they could, bending, twisting, burrowing, appearing as if they extend beyond the space. These gargantuan concrete creatures seemed to shy away from the exhibition space that they were growing too big for, bumping into something on their shuffle out. Exit stage left.
Burrow - Sprout - Grow, Installation, 2019. RCA Degree show
Burrow - Sprout - Grow, Installation, 2019. RCA Degree show
When writing on your practice, you’ve stated that the works “relate to my own body and extended reach, through modular construction, playing with scale and weight.” Could you expand upon the ways in which the works relate to your body, more specifically with regard to the relationship between their monumentality and your own limited, physical reach?
I can pick up one section of my sculpture and people are usually shocked by how light it is, or maybe they just think I’m really strong (I am though). A lot of people ask me ‘is it solid? It must be really heavy, how is it staying up? ‘ or they think it was built by a man because it's so big. I like to do things myself as much as possible and it takes a bit longer to plan things in sections, but if it means I can surprise people with a monumental scale then it's worth it. I’ve perfected my own methods of laminate casting in concrete over the years and they are still getting lighter in weight, and that has enabled me to think bigger, literally a weight off my shoulders. I see it as creating a facade or a stage set, giving the illusion of weightiness. It starts off being scaled to my own body, if I can pick it up one piece by myself and then build on top of that. It becomes a sort of three-dimensional collage and I can change the pieces until I’m happy with it. I can just about pick up a piece that is 1.2m and 70cm width. It also helps when it fits through the door. Individually they are like artefacts but when I put all of the pieces together they can become monumental even for a short time. I think I like being up a ladder or climbing scaffolding, the extended reach comes from that and the impression that it could grow taller than me, or pretend to go out of the window, or give the impression of it, growing out of the floor, the idea of the sculpture growing and expanding beyond the space.
Your practice is very much concerned with materiality, which is demonstrated by your use of recycled and discarded, man-made materials. What influenced you to begin developing a consciousness of the afterlife of materials?
I remember my Dad used to take me to the rubbish tip a lot as a child ( a big day out!) he would take things from the skip to build things and I would help- he crudely built our attic floor out of old wooden door frames. He would take me and my sister litter picking in the woods too, one time we had our picture in the local paper for it! I think that stuck with me and I’ve always had this guilt and desire to recycle as much as possible at home and it started to leak into my practice as I made sculpture. Working in an art school you’d be amazed at the amount of material that gets thrown away. It’s like Christmas for me. At some point contemporary sculpture became a skip filling practice, but I didn’t want my work to do that and I try to encourage my students to consider this as well.
I do have a strange obsession with concrete and I think my curiosity about this material led me to thinking more about it’s after life, and then that of other materials followed. Roman concrete where it has been taken care of has lasted for thousands of years, but modern concrete has a lifespan of 50-100 years and that’s if it isn’t demolished first or fallen into disrepair. But Roman concrete was not entirely man made as it used volcanic ash, modern concrete is a plastic imitation. As I started to research more about concrete I noticed more and more high rise blocks in London amongst endless construction sites, wondering what happens to all that waste of the demolished building. It made me think about what future sediments humans are creating from landfill, pliable and elastic rocks and ruins as the human imprint on the earth.
Burrow 2019 shown at 'Sugar Mountain' exhibition at the Silver Building, London, Curated by Thorp-Stavri
Hide and Seek 2020 Standpoint Gallery London
Rock Paper Scissors 2020. Standpoint Gallery, London
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
My routine is so varied and I work part time, so I get to the studio whenever I can including evenings and weekends. It depends on the project I’m working on and the deadline. The past few years I’ve done residencies in the summer that involved a more intense period of working over 1-2 months. I’ve been in London this summer spending time in the studio testing out new processes. Recently I have been working on paper-clay and paper-concrete mixes, not necessarily with a specific sculpture in mind but that will come later. And now I’m re-building a previous work for an upcoming exhibition. My thinking process is through the making itself, so I figure out how a process works then something will usually come out of it! I do drawing/sketching and take photos of building sites and old ruins and I often seem to have about 4-5 sketch books on the go at once. I like to get stuck into the practical stuff quickly and get my hands dirty, learning something new before I have a finalised idea. My studio is in Stockwell with Acme studios. It’s in the basement but luckily there's a big lift. Everything is on wheels - from my self built storage units and my work benches to parts of my bigger sculptures on skates, so I can keep things moving if I need more space. There’s a small lightwell where I sneakily mix concrete, I’m not supposed to work there but I really appreciate it occasionally! I spend a lot of time cleaning up after myself as things can get messy really quickly. I need a bigger studio but it’s as much as I can afford right now.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
Things feel like they are moving again which is great. I’ve been working with the Koppel Project at the Old Central Saint Martin’s building at Southampton Row over the summer that has been a reset post lockdown to experiment. It’s a building site there and is being turned into a luxury hotel so there are temporary artist studios there for one month periods. It’s such an amazing building, it's a shame it will close so soon. I’m about to start a new project next week though with Proposition Studios in South London, where I am going to create an immersive installation piece over the next month. It’s called ‘The Human As Part of Ecology’ thinking about how our activities impact the ecologies in which we exist. That will be open to the public in October alongside an exciting group of artists.
I’m also taking part in Kensington and Chelsea Artweek from 1st October, in collaboration with Thorp-Stavri. I’m showing my work ‘Burrow Sprout Grow’ in a shop window ironically.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 02/09/20
