Potluck

About

Pool table green, clubland, dancing balls, trick shot; of one form interacting with another, these paintings have been interpreted from the artist's daily journey to the studio, where Robinson passes a snooker hall, bingo club, and multiple charity shops on route. She apprehends what goes on inside the ambiguous windowless, red brick, faded building of the snooker hall by creating paintings that fill in the gaps into that imagined realm, with animated, vibrating, chromatic pocket paintings that give you a wink.

While observing her late grandad watching snooker on a small, portable square TV on the kitchen counter growing up, Robinson interprets the hypnotic, click-clack-clunk as cue hits ball, smattering through colour, plotting her next move, 22 balls, 15 reds, then one ball each of yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black. Each painting at tournament with the artist, navigated through the language of abstraction. 

With the snooker club traditionally a male dominated environment, Robinson is interested in the nature of the escapist enjoyment, community, and kinship of these social environments, but more specifically, the charged gendered nature of these spaces specific to performed social locations in Belfast, where politics of identity and belonging are highly localised, tightly bounded by sense of place. 

This interest in boundaries and obscure spaces carries into her broader process: using materials from the local charity shop as surfaces in her paintings, such as fur coats and wool, which she buffets, collages, and knits together, while ‘feeling things out’. The physicality of the materials used, which wrap around the canvas frame, push the boundaries and borders of painting in broader connection to the female body and excess, contained by hand crocheted artist frames. Robinson is interested in the process of labour and the patriarchal stereotype of the materials she uses falling into predominantly ‘feminine’ craft, challenging interpretation of the work being treated decoratively. Referencing knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, and collectables, along with the previous life of the materials used, gives the paintings a unique personality and plurality of expression, creating playful paintings that are tactile and kinetic.

Potluck is a barbed homage to the snooker club in Belfast, synthesised through boisterous play-by-play paintings, interposing fluro colour onto the low-lit social game, approaching each painting as outrageous flukes that reminds us that everybody needs a lucky break sometimes.

Yasmine Robinson (b, 1994, N. Ireland), is currently based in Belfast, lecturing in Fine Art Foundation Studies at Belfast School of Art. Robinson was awarded a Distinction in her Masters of Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, London (2018), having previously studied BA Fine Art at Ulster University, Belfast (2017). Robinson has been the recipient of awards including; Arts Council of Northern Ireland, SIAP General Arts Award (2022), Tiffany & Co. Outset Studio Makers Prize, London (2018) and RDS Visual Arts Award, Dublin (2017). In 2017 she was awarded the Frank Bowling Scholarship to support her studies at Chelsea College of Art.  Recent projects and exhibitions include; New Exits, The MAC, Belfast (2023), Ingram Collection Prize, Unit 1 Gallery, London (2022), Zabludowicz Master-Class, London (2022), Mutation Station at im labor, Tokyo, Japan (2021), Penumbra, F.E Mc William Gallery, Belfast (2021), Absinthe, Collective Ending, London (2019) and Young Gods, Charlie Smith London (2019).