Kim Robertson
Kim Robertson is a visual artist, researcher, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice spans drawing, photography, digital imagery, printmaking, installation, and video. Her work explores relationships between human consciousness and the living world, investigating how artistic practice can cultivate relational, embodied, and reciprocal engagements with nature. Informed by Indigenous-informed epistemologies, ecology, and practice-led research, her process-led methodology incorporates fieldwork, ceremony, and material experimentation. Through dialogue with human and other-than-human beings, Robertson’s work considers how art can foster ecological awareness and contribute to a re-enchantment of our relationship with the Earth.
Robertson holds an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London, and is a PhD candidate at the Transart Institute in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University, researching Indigenous-informed methodologies in contemporary visual art. She has exhibited widely in the UAE and UK, including a solo exhibition at Project Space, New York University Abu Dhabi, and has participated in multiple international artist residencies. Robertson has taught for over thirty years, including at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and most recently at the New York University Abu Dhabi, where she continues to contribute to interdisciplinary research exchange through the Arts and Humanities Research Forums.
PRAXIS STATEMENT
My practice explores how art can become a site of relational encounter between human and other-than-human beings. Working across drawing, photography, printmaking, installation, video, and performance, I investigate the ways in which perception, material and relational engagement shape our understanding of the living world.
Fieldwork is central to my process. I spend extended periods in the land, engaging through observation, ceremony, and embodied forms of attention. These sites are not treated as subjects to be represented, but as ongoing conversations that inform the development of the work. Materials gathered from place, such as earth, rock pigments, plant matter, and found objects, often become collaborators within the process, carrying traces and memory of the environments from which they emerge.
My research is informed by Indigenous knowledge systems, particularly Andean Shamanism, ecology and a practice-led inquiry. Rather than positioning the human as separate from the world, my work seeks to acknowledge our participation within wider ecological networks. Through this process-led methodology, I seek to create works that hold traces of encounter, reciprocity, and an attunement with nature.
Installations, images, objects, and performative actions, are aimed at creating spaces that invite reflection, attentiveness, and a renewed sense of connection with the Earth. I seek enchantment as a tool to reawakening our inherent connection to this Earth that provokes a moral and ethical response towards environmental concerns.
www.kimrobertson.co.uk
Instagram: @kimrobertson__