Fiona Robinson

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I am interested in the point at which painting and drawing meet. Canvas suggests painting. The 'Journey Sequence Paintings and Circular Walk Drawings' made between 2005 - 2009 address the issue of the nature of drawing and consider the moment when a drawing stops being about drawing and starts being about painting. In my current work I take these ideas further with insistent repetitive, destabilised charcoal lines slashing across the surface of painted canvas. They are undoubtedly paintings. The deliberately painterly use of paint which contributes to the sense of instability, creates a surface which makes them paintings rather than drawings. However they retain a significant element of drawing.
Unstable Horizons is an investigation into instability, of line, of surface, of life. A fascination with what happens when apparently straight lines bend. These drawings and paintings are the result of experiences and visual investigations during two residencies in Ireland in 2010.
oil charcoal and graphite on canvas. 80 x 100 cm.
Charcoal and chalk on paper. 28 x 38 cm
Charcoal and graphite on paper. 28 x 38 cms
Whilst I was in Ireland I worked extensively in sketchbooks. In Co. Mayo my house faced the sea, nothing between me and Greenland, and every morning I drew the rapidly changing horizon, the light, the weather, and the mountains appearing and disappearing like ghosts. At The Cill Rialaig Project in Kerry there was nothing between the rugged coastline and America apart from the Skelligs, two outcrops of rock inhabited in the fourth century by a group of monks. For them, their location was the edge of the known world. I went out to the Skelligs in wild March seas in a ferociously bronco-bucking, little fishing boat and once there, climbed to the top. These experiences translated themselves self into a body of work concerned with Unstable Horizons.

What defines drawing: intention, format, support? Works in sketchbooks tend to be seen as drawings because they are investigative; primary sources; studies for something else; therefore apparently unfinished, ephemeral, work in progress. They are part of a journey towards another state of being.
A line drawn on hot-press paper, rubbed until it fades and fuses with the surface. The bleeding of charcoal trapped and paled by layers of paint. I manipulate these processes until they produce marks of exquisite tension and great spatial depth. I make abstract interpretations of movement across terrain and through interior spaces. My work is an enquiry into process, memory and repetition.
Fiona Robinson
Weymouth
Dorset
United Kingdom
Europe

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