Biography

Ian Robertson trained at Edinburgh College of Art, the Royal College of Art and Skowhegan Art School, USA. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a Postgraduate Award ECA, Hospitalfield Award, Helen Rose Travelling Scholarship, J Milner Kite Award, William Gillies Principal’s Prize ECA, Sir Robin Darwin Scholarship RCA, John Minton Scholarship RCA and the Pernod Arts Award. He has taught and lectured in various UK art schools and was Head of Fine Art at the Cass School of Fine Art, London Metropolitan University, formerly London Guildhall University.

His current project engages with specific places/sites, situations and events including the event of the works making and reception. The working title “Evidence of the Senses” indicates the tenor of this encounter, which without being descriptive of specific places has been concerned with the way in which place/site evoke and engage human presence. The processes of looking, attention, and the consciousness of time are reflected in the work, together with the expansion of the vocabulary of painting and its perception. How they generate experience and are imbued with memory, the weight of time and the speed of forgetting.

The resulting work from this preoccupation with site/situation/event are not theoretical constructs but sites/sights of encounter, the place where this combination of location, landscape and meaning coalesce. Attention to the perceived world and our systems of seeing and representing characterise this mutable approach. The current works move freely between figuration and abstraction, capturing the complexity of experience. They reflect our response to place as it is lived and felt, between our direct observations and our more subjective response between the real and the virtual.