Catriona Robertson is a London based British artist known for her large-scale installations. She gained her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and graduated from the MA in Sculpture course at the Royal College of Art in 2019. Robertson has won multiple awards including the Cass Art Prize, Contemporary Art Development Award 2024, the Boomer Prize, the Gilbert Bayes Award, Royal Society of Sculptors and the Benson Sedgwick Metalworking Residency in 2022. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Ingram Prize and won Second Prize UK New Artist of the Year, Robert Walters Group with an inaugural exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In 2020 the Standpoint Gallery selected Catriona for a Graduate Residency, supported by the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award.
In 2023 she created a sculpture garden ‘Gigantic Pile’ for the Saatchi Gallery RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and was nominated as Women of the Year. ’ Gigantic Pile’ originated at the Merz Barn in the Lake District and has since been shown at the Saatchi Gallery and featured outside the Art House in Wakefield.
Catriona has shown her work nationally and internationally, including winning the Emerging Artist Award in 2018 and exhibiting with the British Council Germany at the Liebermann Villa in Berlin, Norway, Japan and across the UK in Scotland, Somerset and the Lake District.
Catriona is fascinated by ideas of Deep Time and a human made landscape. She is inspired by how architecture forms an urban geology where layers of history are built on top of foundations. Her work responds to the interconnectedness of nature and the city as a landscape resulting in sculptures that embody an architectural imprint. Her use of re-claimed and re-cycled materials reflect on our throw-away culture, where the bedrock beneath the future city will be made up of detritus and past human relics compress to form a new transient sedimentary layer in deep time submerged underwater.
There is a subterranean network of hidden cities beneath us, organic intertwined with inorganic. By covering the ground in concrete, tar and bitumen, we are disrupting the ecological cycle as these inorganic materials degrade at different rates with little or no nutritional benefit to the earth. Her work imagines a narrative of a post-human future in which nature will come back through the cracks as the concrete breaks down. Catriona creates mixed media sculptures on a varying scale, some smaller works appear as if fragments in a future archaeological museum. Most often her sculptures are on a monumental scale using a combination of her signature cast paper-concrete, re-cycled newspaper pulp, cardboard that is applied in layers. She incorporates collected discarded industrial and domestic materials, rubble, corrugated steel roofing, carpet tiles, underlay. She performs a ritual of breakage in her process, pulping materials to their core fibres. By squeezing, cracking and blending these opposing elements into a sculptural collage, the materials become an aggregate. Fragments and chunks are carved out, broken, re-cast and repaired, they become relics of a synthetic marble formed of plasticised concrete.
Catriona has worked in arts education for over twelve years at University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art. In addition to her role at City and Guilds she is the Specialist Metalwork Technician at Central Saint Martins. She has previously taught in the Specialist Mould-Making / Casting Technician as well as workshops and Wood Fabrication. She is a UAL Short Courses Tutor teaching summer schools in Metal Fabrication, Concrete Casting and Silicone Mould-making.
Catriona is also an experienced lecturer and tutor, having given Artist talks at Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Art, Wimbledon, Farnham, Falmouth and Mass Sculpture. She offers insight as a practicing artist, combined with extensive technical knowledge.