top of page

Archive

Drawings

Drawing is an act suspended in time - a bridge between past, present, and future. It potentially allows for an engagement with the world before it is named. It requires a concentrated act of attention. The French philosopher Simone Weil regarded attention as the most important aspect of education, as well as the “rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Greenwich
series

A response to walking the banks of the Thames at low tide. They are fleeting notes and impression’s gained during the course of the day. The transition in light, the slow drag of water, objects emerging like relics as the tide receded. The residual stain left on the sand by the ebbing river. Traces of memory and forgetting.

Hiroshima

Created in Nagoya in collaboration with master papermaker Maheto Ando, these works reflect on the atomic bombings, inspired by a survivor’s plea for peace and Eugen Jebleanu’s poem *The Smile of Hiroshima*. Exhibited at the Toyota Museum of Art. *(Available as a boxed edition.)*

Installation Toyota City Museum

Fragments rescued from the passage of time. What Bergson called duration where the past, present and future elide.

landscape

Summers in the Scottish Highlands near Mallaig—where the Robertson family were kindly offered the use of a studio from glass artist Peter Layton—revealed a landscape shaped by the Highland Clearances. This series explores place as a vessel for memory, silence, and erased histories, later informing his London work. Here, time, place, and event converge, evoking human presence without literal depiction.

Ian Studio 2017 - 1-2.jpg

LG gallery

Sculpture & painting dealing with the landscape of the Western Highlands

network art

A collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Ko Nakajima, media artist Keigo Yamamoto (Musashino Art University), and ArtPraxis (London Guildhall University), exploring new communication technologies.

Oil and Acrylic Paintings

Painting offers a spontaneous dialogue with presence and place— referencing landscape, a synthesis of empirical experience, memory, and time. The studio becomes a ritual space: layers of paint, cellophane, graphite, and digital prints accumulate like strata. Translucency and opacity, masking and ghosting, accidents and the speed of brushstrokes—each marks the painting as an event, surprising us.

Place

The site/sight of history, memory and desire.

plaza gallery

Created in Nagoya in collaboration with master papermaker Maheto Ando, these works reflect on the experience of transience.

process & Installation

Fibreglass squares transition from light to dark on the gallery wall, absorbing and reflecting light while evoking landscape. This interplay between physical experience and representation leaves the question open: *What does the work do?* Perception and interpretation are inseparable.

Fibreglass squares transition from light to dark on the gallery wall, absorbing and reflecting light while evoking landscape. This interplay between physical experience and representation leaves the question open: *What does the work do?* Perception and interpretation are inseparable.

Sculpture Object

Found or constructed objects serve as models to explore ideas—tangible anchors for abstract thought.

The Yellow Paintings

Pure yellow as sensory immersion, a luminous field of perception.

social conflict

Through painting, sculpture, and installation, Robertson examines sites saturated with contested memories and narratives. Place is fluid, its meanings shaped by the events that haunt it.

watercolours

Watercolour is such a seductive medium its fluidity, transparency & luminosity

allowing light to reflect off the white paper beneath, unmatched by opaque mediums. Used for centuries in Asian ink-wash paintings, Persian miniatures, and European Romanticism.

bottom of page