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Curatorial Statement:
“When you first begin, you find only darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing...” ~Author Unknown
To search for truth, we must first lay ourselves bare to two realities: we must admit what we do not know – and that it might be unknowable.
This vulnerability lies at the heart of David Robinson’s art practice. “I occasionally have the good sense to remember that the work itself has better ideas than I do” he quips. But those occasions are many – his voracious appetite for different materials and processes reveals his deep reverence for the integrity of materials and curiosity as to what each new project may teach him.
Unexpected revelations emerge for Robinson as he works, yet these are only foreshadowing for the impact these artworks have in the broader world.
Art is a powerful mediator in our search for truth. It offers new vantage points from which we may observe, and then metabolize what is difficult or unresolved in our lives. While all art forms may take us on this journey, figurative sculpture, in the hands of a master, is uniquely poised to set us on this path.
The figures integral to David Robinson’s corpus engage the viewer’s mirror neurons – brain cells that contribute to empathy and learning. Like Whitman’s poetry Robinson’s sculpture recognizes the body as essential to every aspect of our being, and deserving of great deference and compassion. Created with deep intuition and skill, Robinson’s figures stand as potent proxies; for ourselves, for those we encounter, and for humanity as a whole.
In regarding these figures, standing in the void of what we do not know, our own visceral truths are revealed. And in that vulnerable space, we might notice that, like Robinson’s figures, we are already whole.
~ Sage MacGillivray, 2019
To search for truth, we must first lay ourselves bare to two realities: we must admit what we do not know – and that it might be unknowable.
This vulnerability lies at the heart of David Robinson’s art practice. “I occasionally have the good sense to remember that the work itself has better ideas than I do” he quips. But those occasions are many – his voracious appetite for different materials and processes reveals his deep reverence for the integrity of materials and curiosity as to what each new project may teach him.
Unexpected revelations emerge for Robinson as he works, yet these are only foreshadowing for the impact these artworks have in the broader world.
Art is a powerful mediator in our search for truth. It offers new vantage points from which we may observe, and then metabolize what is difficult or unresolved in our lives. While all art forms may take us on this journey, figurative sculpture, in the hands of a master, is uniquely poised to set us on this path.
The figures integral to David Robinson’s corpus engage the viewer’s mirror neurons – brain cells that contribute to empathy and learning. Like Whitman’s poetry Robinson’s sculpture recognizes the body as essential to every aspect of our being, and deserving of great deference and compassion. Created with deep intuition and skill, Robinson’s figures stand as potent proxies; for ourselves, for those we encounter, and for humanity as a whole.
In regarding these figures, standing in the void of what we do not know, our own visceral truths are revealed. And in that vulnerable space, we might notice that, like Robinson’s figures, we are already whole.
~ Sage MacGillivray, 2019
Surface Tension
In the studio the work of the mind and that of the hand coalesce under the particular inherence of matter. One cannot trust one’s own mind to be always truthful nor the hand and eye to resist pretension, but the third element, matter, is never compromised, never without its integrity. It is, unlike the virtual, never without its virtue.
Clay, wax, molten metal – to work toward any concept in such media is to be tripped up on the first step of the journey by the pre-existent inherence of the lump of matter in hand. The traditional sculptor’s attitude toward this challenge occurs somewhere within a continuum, framed on the one side by a will to absolute technical mastery tending toward ever more exultant variations of realism, and on the other by a more recent opposing orthodoxy in which truth-to-materials is all.
Surface tension is a molecular economy of particles tending toward an inherent order - an ideal form. What is surprising about this is that it is a physical property of inert matter that looks, for all the world, like some kind of microcosmic aesthetic preference.
I read meaning into my vocation by way of having my hand guided, my eye illumined and my mind changed under this presiding influence of matter.
In the studio the work of the mind and that of the hand coalesce under the particular inherence of matter. One cannot trust one’s own mind to be always truthful nor the hand and eye to resist pretension, but the third element, matter, is never compromised, never without its integrity. It is, unlike the virtual, never without its virtue.
Clay, wax, molten metal – to work toward any concept in such media is to be tripped up on the first step of the journey by the pre-existent inherence of the lump of matter in hand. The traditional sculptor’s attitude toward this challenge occurs somewhere within a continuum, framed on the one side by a will to absolute technical mastery tending toward ever more exultant variations of realism, and on the other by a more recent opposing orthodoxy in which truth-to-materials is all.
Surface tension is a molecular economy of particles tending toward an inherent order - an ideal form. What is surprising about this is that it is a physical property of inert matter that looks, for all the world, like some kind of microcosmic aesthetic preference.
I read meaning into my vocation by way of having my hand guided, my eye illumined and my mind changed under this presiding influence of matter.
On Gravity
The function of gravity as both fact and metaphor is the central paradox of the sculptor’s creative process. Under the sway of this aesthetic confluence, the objective viewer of a figure in space becomes implicated into the microcosm of the art work by means of a kind of metaphorical vertigo. This visceral response is the essential persuasive mechanism of the medium of sculpture.
The function of gravity as both fact and metaphor is the central paradox of the sculptor’s creative process. Under the sway of this aesthetic confluence, the objective viewer of a figure in space becomes implicated into the microcosm of the art work by means of a kind of metaphorical vertigo. This visceral response is the essential persuasive mechanism of the medium of sculpture.
Being commissioned to do large-scale public work has always been the perceived zenith of a sculptor’s career. Though I may imagine my work in public spaces, standing writ large in bronze or steel, the new reality is that the public square has become a minefield, successfully navigated only by the politically astute. These small works stand like monuments on the square of my own upturned hand, here is a plot of available ground upon which to speculate a common vision.
Through an hour glass darkly
There is a dance of ulterior motifs that pulse below and swell to the interplay of mind, matter and time. The intuitive artist walks and tends the neural pathways into that deep realm; there to learn its rhythms, feed on its music, and smuggle back into the world whatever currencies can be found there. Strange artifacts too, from that strange land clutter his rooms. Catching the light as their shadows play across the walls, and in solar tempo reanimate the dance from which they were conceived.
There is a dance of ulterior motifs that pulse below and swell to the interplay of mind, matter and time. The intuitive artist walks and tends the neural pathways into that deep realm; there to learn its rhythms, feed on its music, and smuggle back into the world whatever currencies can be found there. Strange artifacts too, from that strange land clutter his rooms. Catching the light as their shadows play across the walls, and in solar tempo reanimate the dance from which they were conceived.
Silver Works Balance: Detritus, and Time Well-Wasted
Like Lori Anderson's musical treatise in which the act of walking is expressed as a constant falling forward, the artist is generally best kept off-balance. In practice, this stumbling-forward momentum is sometimes done by allowing the hand, eye, and mind to wander in the dubious company of obtuse and uncooperative materials and processes; rough terrain over which any previously held virtuosic skill cannot be carried. These bronze and silver objects are made of, or rather from, foam coffee cups, stir sticks, Post-It Notes, plastic cutlery, toothpicks, old sand-casting patterns. A workbench cluttered with such things can, and probably should, be read like an analog mind-map of the artist in question. As much as it injures my authorial pride, I try no longer to shield myself from the question: What is the primary defect of a mind for which these objects are the primary output… In the end, however, I cannot but resign myself to the burden and privilege of the thing —When God* gives you visions, make visual-aids.
At any rate, it seems I’ve come to the place where, on some days at least, I can no longer distinguish myself from my studio, theory from practice, and in which the ten thousand collected artifacts on my studio shelves preside like jars of preserves: ideas of which the wax-seals have yet to be broken.
*(or his agents, assigns, or representatives – whether declared either by omnipresence or absence)
Like Lori Anderson's musical treatise in which the act of walking is expressed as a constant falling forward, the artist is generally best kept off-balance. In practice, this stumbling-forward momentum is sometimes done by allowing the hand, eye, and mind to wander in the dubious company of obtuse and uncooperative materials and processes; rough terrain over which any previously held virtuosic skill cannot be carried. These bronze and silver objects are made of, or rather from, foam coffee cups, stir sticks, Post-It Notes, plastic cutlery, toothpicks, old sand-casting patterns. A workbench cluttered with such things can, and probably should, be read like an analog mind-map of the artist in question. As much as it injures my authorial pride, I try no longer to shield myself from the question: What is the primary defect of a mind for which these objects are the primary output… In the end, however, I cannot but resign myself to the burden and privilege of the thing —When God* gives you visions, make visual-aids.
At any rate, it seems I’ve come to the place where, on some days at least, I can no longer distinguish myself from my studio, theory from practice, and in which the ten thousand collected artifacts on my studio shelves preside like jars of preserves: ideas of which the wax-seals have yet to be broken.
*(or his agents, assigns, or representatives – whether declared either by omnipresence or absence)
Studies in serendipity…
What consolation is there for the painter, say, who, upon completing the careful execution of a fine little picture with his right hand, looks down and is transported by the raw and swirling beauty of the palette in his left? These cascading and volute shapes are simple exultations in form. Their elemental complexities are to sculpture what birdsong is to music. Stop, attend, and they will insinuate pattern and significance. Pattern and significance, now relegated to the subjective realm, in these instances take on the conceptual form of personal homage. As I attend to the assemblage of these unlinked concatenations, there wanders variously to mind the attenuations of Giacometti, the erosions of Moore, the flailing sinew of Boccioni, the swirling drapery of water.
What consolation is there for the painter, say, who, upon completing the careful execution of a fine little picture with his right hand, looks down and is transported by the raw and swirling beauty of the palette in his left? These cascading and volute shapes are simple exultations in form. Their elemental complexities are to sculpture what birdsong is to music. Stop, attend, and they will insinuate pattern and significance. Pattern and significance, now relegated to the subjective realm, in these instances take on the conceptual form of personal homage. As I attend to the assemblage of these unlinked concatenations, there wanders variously to mind the attenuations of Giacometti, the erosions of Moore, the flailing sinew of Boccioni, the swirling drapery of water.
An ordinary piece of paper selflessly denies its own third dimension in the service of surface. Uninterestingly, there is some discourse among titular titans of my trade as to whether “sculpture is about surface”. I take some askance pleasure in the paper jam that these works represent in that arcane discourse.
Working in Obscurity
Some method is required by which one could unmake the overwrought. The simple clarity of energy, gesture, power that is the artist’s first inhalation of a new work-that is the thing that most needs to be kept, and that is most often lost. My own appreciation of these shrouded plinth/figures is the way in which this fine film of metal can mediate and eradicate the folly of my own best intentions. Much is revealed in all we cannot see. It is better too, if the artist can be convinced to step aside and stop blocking people’s view of the art.
Some method is required by which one could unmake the overwrought. The simple clarity of energy, gesture, power that is the artist’s first inhalation of a new work-that is the thing that most needs to be kept, and that is most often lost. My own appreciation of these shrouded plinth/figures is the way in which this fine film of metal can mediate and eradicate the folly of my own best intentions. Much is revealed in all we cannot see. It is better too, if the artist can be convinced to step aside and stop blocking people’s view of the art.
My work uses spatial and material arrangements of the formal and the figurative as catalyst and crux to moments of aesthetic poise, tension, and reflection. Representational by idiom and conceptual by persuasion, this work partakes of the powerful human weakness for discerning transcendent pattern in the cosmos.
The figure at the nucleus of all of my sculptural works sparks a connection between the viewer and our human propensity for narrative as personal and communal catharsis. The sculptural figure broadcasts its visual aesthetic at a broadly accessible bandwidth; it speaks across boundaries of age and culture; it withstands the shifting moment, while marking the path in a flow of continuous change.
Firing this strange vision and calling is the heat and light thrown off by recurring revelation inherent in the studio practice: That its physical work and discipline are incarnational - the mind in generative collaboration with matter. That the constraints of hard necessity are both a binding and an emancipation of the artist’s hand. Work and art, patron and artist, public and individual - that each can be reformed and refined by the other.
The figure at the nucleus of all of my sculptural works sparks a connection between the viewer and our human propensity for narrative as personal and communal catharsis. The sculptural figure broadcasts its visual aesthetic at a broadly accessible bandwidth; it speaks across boundaries of age and culture; it withstands the shifting moment, while marking the path in a flow of continuous change.
Firing this strange vision and calling is the heat and light thrown off by recurring revelation inherent in the studio practice: That its physical work and discipline are incarnational - the mind in generative collaboration with matter. That the constraints of hard necessity are both a binding and an emancipation of the artist’s hand. Work and art, patron and artist, public and individual - that each can be reformed and refined by the other.
Having spent some hours at the Gordon and Leslie Diamond Healthcare Centre as a recovering cardiac surgical patient, David was inspired by the shared experience of fellow patients all gathered in the lofty and hushed place of waiting. As witness to patients’ imposed vigilance under the glacial passage of time, Robinson reflected upon the many people that gather there under the spirit of human care; every living body a vessel upon uncharted waters.
This artwork asks us to consider the body and the soul “aloft in countervailing vortices of gravity and grace. The slow turning, rise and fall; breath as wind, as spirit…. In this work, we see ourselves reflected, leaning into the wind and navigating realms unknown.”
David would like to thank Gordon and Leslie Diamond as well as the VGH UBC Hospital Foundation for helping him realize his vision. Donations to support the Foundation and the maintenance of this artwork can be made here.
This artwork asks us to consider the body and the soul “aloft in countervailing vortices of gravity and grace. The slow turning, rise and fall; breath as wind, as spirit…. In this work, we see ourselves reflected, leaning into the wind and navigating realms unknown.”
David would like to thank Gordon and Leslie Diamond as well as the VGH UBC Hospital Foundation for helping him realize his vision. Donations to support the Foundation and the maintenance of this artwork can be made here.
