Helen Robertson

Biography

How specific architectures and their histories impact on lived experience; how the built and unbuilt environment - weather, air and light - both allow and restrict experience; and how to shift towards a more porous attitude to architecture and its wider ecologies are concerns I am exploring through installations, performances, writing and curation. My recent work responds to architecture where women have played a significant role, exploring the politics of space and gender.

As part of the artist-led curatorial group Outside Architecture I have co-curated exhibitions, configuring relations between artworks and architecture.

My work has been shown in venues such as Matts Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Stadthaus Ulm. Recent exhibitions include: Utopia In Crisis, Bauhaus University Weimar 2021; ‘the Undersides of Practice’ APT gallery London (reviewed Art Monthly March 2020); “come and go, halt extreme left” Outside Architecture, Winchester School of Art 2019; “Drift” Outside Architecture, Thames Side Studio’s gallery 2019.

I also work collaboratively with artists Lucy Gunning and Bernice Donszelmann on participatory performance works in public space. These works question ideas of individual agency and equality. An example was [these roarers] at the Whitstable Biennale 2018, a shore-side event involving public participation.

In 2018 I initiated ‘I Dance the Other’, a cross disciplinary dance art collaboration between Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art and Studio Wayne McGregor exploring cross fertilization between dance and fine art. Leading this teaching project has enabled a reciprocity between student-centred work and the development of my own research interest in kinaesthetic thinking.