Interview with Sam Robinson – Wimbledon College of Art BA Fine Art: Painting alumnus
What medium do you work with, and what will you be exhibiting at Sum of Substance?
My art practice involves a range of differrent aprroaches, including painting, sculpture and installations which utilise post-industrial materials such as re-claimed wood, found objects and tools, and combining them with ‘higher cultural’ materials such as paint.
The pieces I am showing in The Sum of Substance are taken from my ongoing Jammer series in which I am developing a new process of painting. The process itself involves the development of an image on found boards. The first step was to cut structures into the surface of the wood, which were based on images of pylons and radio jamming masts. The second stage was an attempt to eke out a sense of scale and landscape by washing paint over the surface of the panels, drawing out the shapes and forms inherent in the material.
For me the interest in the work lies in the attrition between the physicality of the material and the illusionistic sense of depth and scale in the pieces: impossible structures in an improbable symbiosis, where both deliberate and accidental marks and traumas in surface are left open to the viewer’s interpretation. The evidence of its materiality is brought to bear as a part of the work as hints of a forgotten utilitarianism.
What narratives inform your work for the show?
My work navigates between ideas of Romanticism, Materialism and Environmentalism. In a broader sense my work is involved with depicting harsh man-made structures set into or imposed upon large open wildernesses, carving up and channelling immersive spaces and movement within the paintings and creating a potential energy across planes of flat abstraction.
The geometric forms themselves developed through observation of structures of power; dams, wind turbines and even the symbol of the national grid are transfigured into unlikely structures that resist entrance into the pictorial environment of the paintings: meditations on our changing relationship to landscape and our experience of natural spaces due to the drastic development of communication and how we use earthly resources.
These constructed environments, physical or pictorial, question a utopian synthesis between man and the natural world. They denote a precarious balance between materiality and illusions of landscape, suitable for our epoch where uncertain global futures loom large over all material production; whether industrial or artistic.
How do you feel your work engages with the show’s theme of value and how we measure it?
These works engage with the themes of the show by being an exploration into the understanding that it is the use of materials which determines survival, be it for an artwork or a greater ideal of ecosystemic balance. Each piece is a sum of the substances from which it is derived, and this is exposed to the viewer. It is the self-conciousness of their physicality which questions our value of materials, their potential, and the fragility of balanced systems that are perched on the edge of collapse and chaos.
What’s coming up next for you after Sum of Substance?
I am currently a member of the Continental Operations Gallery which is a nomadic Gallery comprising a collection of artists from South London. Throughout ther next few months there will be various exhibitions appearing around London. For updates on when and where there is visit – www.continentaloperations.com
Originally published on Jotta. Interview by Rebecca Santiago.
Sum of Substance exhibition at the Affordable Art Fair, 15 – 18 March 2012.
Image: Sam Robinson.
