Fiona Robinson: Extracts From the Journey Sequence

The Study Gallery’s Space at 'Lighthouse', Poole Centre for the Arts, Dorset 31 May – 5 July 08

Fiona Robinson’s exhibition moves most people entering the exhibition into a different state of being.  The collective intrinsic qualities of the drawings and paintings exude a meditative state that prompts many to slow their pace and change their bearing, as if needing physically to express empathy with the qualities of the work.

Taken from the Journey Sequence 2007, the exhibition of abstract paintings and drawings also prompts acceptance of what they might be ‘about,’ by-passing the commonly expressed need to know what they are ‘of’.

Conceptually, these are beautifully edited and refined artworks.  In different ways, the paintings and drawings express a lyrical sense of journeying, surveying, tracking and investigating territory and infer a timeless connection between walks and terrain now and in the past.  Whether they embody or encapsulate personal, empathetic or subconscious references – or even specific genetic links – to particular geographic patterns of tribal exploration, migration and settlement is part of their mystery and ethereal quality.  They are certainly the antithesis of narratives about journeys in the macho, adventurous sense.

Robinson achieves artistic communication though exquisite layering and control of line, tone and colour.  Coloured surfaces are reminiscent of minerals, sea and sky; drawings executed on the gentlest of tonal surfaces are more map-like.  Both are laid down as part of an inherent, improvised inter-play between the material, the recalled and existential.  Ultimately, as finely resolved artworks, they have a rare purity and elegance.

Jem Main

www.thestudygallery.org

Fiona Robinson won the 2007 Bath Painting Prize and was an ‘Invited Artist’ at the International Drawing Bienniale in Kosovo, Spring 2008.  Previously she was a prize-winner at the 4^th International Biennale of Drawing, Melbourne