Boats – Robyn

Awards

Member of the
‘Society of Scottish Artist’

2021

Royal Cambrian Academy
Annual Open, Highly commended , 2021

2020

Wales Contemporary
3-Dimensional 1st Prize 2020

About

Robyn Neild’s sculpture responds
to nature’s ‘unique fingerprint’ of organic
forms and textures. The artist is interested in nature’s tipping point, finding the transformation of decay more beautiful than the symmetry of bloom.

Neild models directly uses natural materials such as bramble, hawthorn,
or tree roots. These botanicals are destroyed in the casting process, the bronze replacing them, retaining their texture and angles, supplanting the ephemeral with the permanent.

Dungeness landscape

Abandoned boat hull in Dungeness

Winged Boat Unique solid bronze

2020

the beauty of

Decay

Decay brings gaps and these pauses are reflected in the way Neild works with bronze. She challenges her material to become spindly, delicate, disrupting our idea of bronze as heavy, solid, masculine. Neild relishes the chance spaces created by the bronze navigating its way through small gaps in the cast, cooling with the effort of movement.

Vessel with Huts Unique solid bronze 2020 shown at Turner Contemporary

Close up of Resting Boat

Sky Anchor Unique solid bronze 2017 cast from roots

Resting Boat with Brambles Unique solid bronze

2018

Boat Fragment Unique solid bronze

2018

Fragile Unique solid bronze, flame patina

2017

Fragile Unique solid bronze, flame patina

This interaction with decay can be seen in her skeletal boats. These sagging, resting objects for Neild have connotations of sanctuary and past voyage. Abandoned, they no longer act as refuge for humans, but continue to harbour natural life as they are interpolated back into the earth. She often juxtaposes their organic shapes and sensual curves, which share similarities with the fecund seed pod or fig, with the barbed admittance of thorns.

Beachcombing in Dungeness

Shadow play in studio

Dunge
-ness

I was fortunate enough to spend the spring and early summer months in Dungeness, a flat shingle expanse of stark beauty, staying in of 2017 home of the artist Derek Jarman. Every day I’d walk the length of the estate from my remote home to the bus stop and travel the slow one hour to my studio and then back each evening. During these walks I’d pass one of the abandoned shells of an old fishing boat, the timber keel bone dry and sun bleached, and I’d admire its graceful arcing presence defying the harsh elements in a silent, slow motion destruction.

As I repeatedly made these journeys the form became a familiar and personal image in my mind and so too the idea of creating my own interpretation as a homage, a reminder, a tactile memory of my time in ‘the fifth quarter of the globe’.

These bronze boats are many things to me, the simplest of which is a discovery and progression in my artistic practice. At another less tangible level they are both sentinels that guard a part of me from a time I will long remember, and family to the heroic forms that watch over a magical place.