Ro Robertson

My practice is committed to a cyclical process which straddles sculpture, drawing, painting, and performance. I jump between spaces of the personal and the shared by crossing back and forth between inner and outer landscapes resulting in ongoing abstract drawings and paintings, sculptures (indoor and outdoor) and video works. The gaps I jump over when navigating different environments and mediums relate conceptually and spiritually with spaces left empty by oppressive systems which have caused fractures in our Queer histories and experience. In the search for unity, I consider the diverse natural world in constant flux where boundaries aren’t binary and rigid but rather flow in constant harmony like the interconnected wave that travels the whole earth in one uninterrupted movement.

“Often drawing attention to the transitional, in-between spaces that occur naturally in our environment, Robertson suggests a way forward that relies on plurality – a necessity if humankind is to look beyond the earth as a resource to be mined for our convenience.” – Kirsty White, Burlington Contemporary

Robertson’s collective body of welded abstract steel sculptures, Interlude II, is included in the group show Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes at The Hepworth Wakefield until April 2025 and touring to The Box, Plymouth and Museum Arnhem, Netherlands. Modern Thresholds: Ro Robertson, a site-responsive display of drawing and sculpture is on view at Tate St Ives until December 2025. Robertson’s public sculpture Drench, inspired by the energy of the tidal zone, was exhibited in Regent’s Park, London as part of Frieze Sculpture 2022 and is now on view at the Sainsbury Centre’s Sculpture Park. Robertson’s first public sculpture titled Stone (Butch) exhibited for Sculpture in the City in 2021 is included in Gemma Rolls-Bentley’s Queer Art: From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between and is on permanent display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In 2025 Wakefield Council will unveil a newly commissioned monumental, site-specific work by Ro Robertson titled The Source.

Exhibitions include: An Axis of Abstraction: Art in Cornwall and Yorkshire – Then and Now, Leeds Art Gallery; Across the Pond: Contemporary Painting in London, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Drawing attention: emerging artists in dialogue by The British Museum, York Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery & Hartlepool Art Gallery; Dreaming of Home at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley; We Are Floating In Space, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, Newlyn / Penzance; TRICKSTER FIGURES: sculpture and the body curated by Jes Fernie,  MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; Behind abstract forms, Fragment Gallery, New York; On Queer Ground, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Seen, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange; Into Abstraction, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield and Exploratory Drawings, Maximillian William, London.

Works by Robertson are held in the collections of the British Museum, The Arts Council Collection, York Art Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, The Hepworth Wakefield and Leeds Museums & Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, US.