Fiona Robertson

My work is centrally concerned with the uses of memory, both in the formation of identity (collective and personal) and the way art, repurposing memory, can subvert and reimagine identity in turn.  In this I see my work as following a lineage of artists who challenged artistic and political norms through the primitive, the childish and the surreal: in particular, Dadaism and Expressionism. Working across drawing, experimental film, painting and sculpture, I rework techniques from different eras and genres of art, like oil portraiture or the tropes of early, silent cinema. Thematically, these methods are coupled with the use of humour, folklore, symbolism and the reworking of old or broken forms to create spaces both drawn out of time and estranged from it. All of the above considered, I see my work as an intervention into a contemporary moment where memory itself has entered into crisis.The particularity and history of a site is often a starting point for my film work - ebbtideflowtide 2020, The Cook the Cupboard and Joan of Arc 2020, VENTILATOR 2017, GREENHEAD 2015. My films take place within the constructed fictional worlds. I create non-linear narratives in which performers haunt the landscape in costumes constructed using recycled materials; these materials are themselves are often harvested from the environment, mimicking the terrain they inhabit.