Catriona Robertson
2021 SECOND-PRIZE WINNER
Location: London
Education: Cental Saint Martins (Fine Art)
Biography
Catriona Robertson is a Scottish/British artist living in London. Catriona graduated from the Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture and Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art. She has recently been awarded a Studio Prize at SET in Woolwich and commissioned to build a large scale installation for the SET lobby. Her most ambitious work includes creating an Immersive exhibition ‘WYRM’ part of ‘Terra Nexus’ funded by the Proposition studios at the former ITV building on the Southbank in 2021, where she produced work in response to our relationship with the ecology, soil erosion, the importance of biodiversity and the anthropocene. In 2020 she was selected for the Standpoint Gallery studio residency programme supported by the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, and in 2019 was awarded a funded place as artist in residence at MERZ in Sanquhar, supported by Creative Scotland with a solo exhibition.
Submitted work
Title: Burrow Sprout Grow
About the work
Burrow Sprout Grow responds to architecture and the hidden spaces interwoven above and below ground within the fast changing rising concrete landscape and urban geology. The amalgamated cast surfaces reveal layers of repurposed construction site and domestic waste that become the aggregate of a stone-like surface as a sculptural collage of a future ruin. These are set with concrete, plaster, clay and paper-pulp forming an imprint of a new fossilised sedimentary layer of the anthropocene that has crystalised. The resulting surface retains an unfinished quality, a temporality and fragility as an imagined synthetic marble or stone that grows like a gargantuan creature consuming these materials. This draws to question, what new deep time imprints are we creating with layers of landfill, concrete and toxic chemicals that we put into the ground? What aggregates will the new monuments and architecture of the future made of, pliable, plastic, concrete of precarity?
