Collection: Carol Robertson

Carol Robertson’s paintings remain firmly rooted within reductive abstract conventions. Although she doesn't seek to confirm or record the way the world looks, her work is never disconnected from it. She continues to make an informal relationship with landscape, architecture, nature and the environment. Her current work still employs familiar geometric formations, particularly circles, but in recent years she has also deconstructed the circle into arcs, thereby exploring a more disruptive asymmetry. Throughout her career she has chosen to use the square, rectangle and circle for their ideal power, for their aesthetic beauty.

“The power and beauty of geometric form and detail provides me with a catalyst for ways to make art. Adopting the formal restraints of a reductive and often repetitive geometric language takes the chaos out of what otherwise would be an impossibly vast set of visual options upon which to pin my existence. Geometry allows me to concentrate on the essential. It allows me the freedom to channel sensory or poetic material through its refined parameters. Over time my work evolves in tandem with whatever is happening in my life, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually and physically. The enduring constant is my commitment to working with the non-hierarchical and pragmatic language of geometric abstraction”.

“The circle is the most archetypal of all the forms I use: it has a universal resonance, so frequently found in art, architecture and ritual: an evocation of the universe and the heavens: the journey inwards, or outward, to or from the centre: a symbol of wholeness, completion and infinity: the unbroken line with no beginning or end: the eternal cycle”.

In recent years Robertson has been responding more directly to a state of flux and impermanence, recording notions of transience and change. Multi-coloured circles or arcs began to traverse her canvasses, sometimes with collisions and crossovers registering flashes of chance and coincidence, or summoning reminiscences of small arcane details that fleetingly curve across one’s vision.