Venue
The Muse Gallery
Starts
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Ends
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Address
269 Portobello Road, W11 1LR
Location
London
Organiser
The Muse Gallery

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 ?