I Am the Landscape, Catriona Robertson

About

We are living in a human-made landscape, where few truly wild places remain. 

In the urban forest, Nature finds a way to grow around humans shifting in order to survive. Undulating beneath the tarmac like magma, lichens latch onto brick walls, weeds grow over verges and fronds reach out through the cracks of concrete. 

Precarious and appearing on the edge of collapse, Robertson’s sculptures adapt in response to their surrounding environment. They burrow and bury themselves, digging into the ground, carving out pathways up into the ceiling — a precursor of a post-human future in which Nature will come back through the cracks, as concrete breaks down and makes way for something new.

Gargantuan worm-like creatures have evolved to digest the urban geological layer created by the Anthropocene - of synthetic materials that have been compressed over time, excavating new age sediments and reconstructing future architectures. Tunnelling through in-between spaces, Robertson's Amorphous forms re-emerge with a newly hardened stone-like shell, like fossils unearthed from the crust, meeting the air for the first time in millennia.

There is a subterranean network of hidden cities vibrating beneath our feet, where the organic and inorganic are inextricably intertwined. By covering the ground in concrete, tar and bitumen, we are disrupting rhythm of natural ecological cycles, with little or no benefit to the earth. In living human memory, the world has changed at an accelerated rate. What will the monuments of the future be made of ? 

Catriona Robertson is a Scottish/British artist living in London. Catriona graduated from the Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture in 2019. Catriona was commissioned by the Saatchi Gallery to create an immersive garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, 2023 in collaboration with David Green Gardens, exploring the re-wilding of future urban landscapes and re-imagining post -human ecologies. Following this ambitious work she was nominated for Women of the Year 2023 and was invited to exhibit ‘Gigantic Pile’ at the Art House in Wakefield. She won the Gilbert Bayes Award, Royal Society of Sculptors 2022 and was selected for the Benson-Sedgwick Metalwork Residency in 2023. In 2021 she was awarded the Second Prize UK New Artist of the Year with an inaugural exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery supported by Robert Walters Group.