Torsos
Ro Robertson
TORSOS
3 September – 1 October 2022
London
With [Ro] Robertson’s sculptures, there is always one more iteration, another obscure attachment, a formal or conceptual hinge about to give way, like a human body, never to resume its original shape or meaning.
– Matthew Cheale
Maximillian William, London is pleased to present Torsos, the second solo show at the gallery from the Cornwall-based artist Ro Robertson. The presentation brings together for the first time the Torso series of indoor sculptures and coincides with Robertson’s presentation of their second outdoor sculpture Drench in Frieze Sculpture, Regent’s Park, London (14 September – 13 November 2022). Torso I was first presented in Subterrane, Robertson’s first solo exhibition at Maximillian William, London, in October 2021. Torso II was first presented in the group exhibition Seen at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance, in October 2021. The final sculpture in the trio is presented for the first time in Torsos.
Ro Robertson’s practice spans performances, drawings and sculptures through which they explore the terrain of the Queer body in landscape. The trio of abstract Corten steel sculptures which make up Torsos present an expanded understanding of the figure via a body of bodies.
The sculptures are a departure from the torso and its associations with an idealised body relating to one of two genders. This collection of bodies is presented as an archipelago, with the sculptures viewed ‘in the round’, with one form seen through the next and the shifts of the irregular shapes experienced as a journey. These heavy steel sculptures are situated on or close to the ground rather than upheld on a plinth, weighted with stones weighing down sections of clothing and with pools of pigmented jesmonite on the floor.
The biomorphic forms welded by Robertson from waterjet-cut sheet Corten steel are painted in blues and paired with found objects, which include items of clothing from performance-for-camera works made over the last three years. The mulch-filled sports socks are from stonebodywater, made in the waterways of the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, shiny blue ‘manstore’ shorts from their performance Packing, filmed in a dramatic sea crevice at Godrevy Point in St Ives Bay and, more recently, white boxer shorts from birthbuildshift, made on a remote nudist beach near Land’s End.
Socks, white vests and shorts or underwear are three items that often reoccur in Robertson’s performances and sculptures, where the role of underwear is reversed as it shifts from base layer to outer protective layer in full view. The soft white of the cotton vests provides a drastic contrast with the weathering steel and its hard associations. These garments, which Robertson describes as a ‘base layer’, reference gendered and Queer motifs, and have a specific connection with masquerade laws that were imposed on trans, non-binary and Queer communities in both the US and UK prior to and throughout the period that sparked the ‘Stonewall Riots’ and the gay liberation movement. The masquerade laws – also known as the three-article rule or the three-piece law – meant that somebody assigned female at birth should wear three items of female clothing and vice versa. Binary gender was enforced by law, with anyone who stepped outside of gender norms criminalised.
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