Image: Tate Modern, London
This display centres on Robertson’s practice and their installation ‘Interlude’, presented alongside paintings by artists who worked in Cornwall in the twentieth century. ‘Modern Thresholds’ concludes the Modern Conversations Tate collection displays.
Ro Robertson’s new installation combines drawings developed on Porthmeor Beach and at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives with sculptures created at the artist’s studio in nearby Lelant. ‘Interlude’ responds to the tidal zone of Porthmeor Beach and the changing shoreline between the headlands of The Island and Carrick Du, opposite the gallery. Robertson has approached the landscape through the lens of LGBTQIA+ experience, describing nature as a diverse world in constant flux, where boundaries are not binary and rigid but flow in constant harmony. The installation explores meeting points between mind and body, body and land, land and sea, and rigid steel and fluid paint.
Ro Robertson was born in 1984. The surrounding Cornwall paintings employ colour, space and gestural mark-making to communicate emotional and sensory relationships with the landscape, as well as social and environmental transformations.
Peter Lanyon’s ‘Lost Mine’ draws on a tin mine in his native Cornwall that had been flooded by the sea and abandoned. Its colours are both representational and symbolic: black stands for the mine shaft and seems to signify death, blue represents the sea and sky, and red signals life and danger.
A painting based on the burning of gorse on the moorland above the town of Zennor shows smoke rising in a threatening, anthropomorphic mass. Painted at the height of the Vietnam War, it evokes the barbarism suffered by successive generations.
