Robbie Rowlands

“...folk poet of the zeitgeist.”
Ross Moore – The Age

“...take a momentary step back from the familiar”
Delana – Web Urbanist

Robbie Rowlands is a Melbourne based artist whose work explores notions of stability and vulnerability through the manipulation of objects and environments. His repetitious and precise cuts and the resulting distortions reflect the inescapable passing of time that affects everything around us. Rowlands’ works have been described as “spotlighting the history, humanity and function” of his subjects. His manipulated objects and spaces blur the boundaries between our fabricated world and the natural world.

Rowlands bases his sculptural work on things that exist at the fringes of our awareness, utilitarian objects such as lampposts or desks. He refashions them into something altogether different yet in a way that never allows their original identity to be shed. The mass produced and functional designs are softened and framed in terms of a new aesthetic, giving the object a renewed energy or sensibility. The effect is to reveal hidden potential in what had come to be regarded as outmoded. If the former object is largely unrecognizable in the new sculpture, the process is not one of violence, rather there is a sense of redemption, as if the object has been liberated from obsolescence, from forgetfulness. This redemptive sense is twofold; on the one hand the object has become something else, inhabiting a new and often sensuous form. On the other hand we can’t help reading this new form back into the old; we sense that the change is not entirely arbitrary, that maybe this new energy, this emerging beauty and potential was always there in the original object, even as it was sat on, written on, or passed by on the way to work. As such his work enables us to reflect upon the wider process of change, upon what our relation with things might suggest about us, and perhaps invites us to inject a little more care into the quotidian realm.