Mia Roberts

My interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, text and electronics to explore tensions between material, identity, space and place. I question accepted social structures of class and gender, rooted in my own experiences growing up in Holyhead, a port town situated at the top of North Wales. My practice engages the discomfort and contradictory nature of living outside normative identities in a rural setting. I unpick how trans-ness expresses itself within the confines of extreme masculinity, existing as a counter weight to an upbringing diametrically opposed to vulnerability.

My work uses contrasting sculptural and industrial matter as material and method. Concrete, glass, rope, metal and ceramics spill, contract, pierce and confine. Precarious and fragile, sculptural forms undermine the assumed stability in constructed identities. I use the qualities of these traditionally masculine-coded materials (hard/soft, violent/tactile) to create physical, contradictory objects which explore the influence of expectations, environments and systems beyond our control.

Engaging in processes that embody industrial and domestic rural histories, I attempt to reframe materials as vessels of transformation. As installations, sculptural objects are often incorporated into architectural interventions in the gallery space, dictating who is allowed access and visibility in given areas.

My practice has been informed by time spent navigating alcoholism and addiction around the North Wales Coast. The lived experience of sleeping rough and struggling to come to terms with a body that did not align with my identity drives gendered material exploration and tensions through material .