Ann Robinson + Terry Stringer: Lightwell / Aspects

“Selecting works for an exhibition is a matter of finding the common thread – form perhaps, or colour, a theme or surface decoration or maybe size. Each selection – a different choice of related works – would result in a very different exhibition. These recent works all involve creative and technical risk.

My own mother was my earliest creative influence. She unfolded a process and by following its rules I realised that I could have a vision, and follow a process, and make a thing, an object, or whatever, that had meaning to me. I have often described my art practice as ‘making concrete my inner world’.

It was in 1964 at Elam Art School, where I fell in love with another process – that of casting. Terry and I both started there, beginning our separate journeys in casting. Casting is a process that is wonderful in its ability to facilitate the melding of ideas, feelings and material.”

Ann Robinson

 “I can scarcely believe that it is so long ago, but it was in the late 1960’s that Ann Robinson and I were at Elam Art School together. Along with workshops for painting, sculpture and design, we had lectures in history and theory. Back then when Art History was mentioned between ourselves, it was referred to as “Art, Truth and Beauty”. Those are topics that may not be currently appropriate, but even then, it was said with some irony.

With my exhibiting alongside Ann and to remember a friendship that goes back to then, it seemed right to make a sculpture that calls up those days. Art is represented by a hand, Truth the temple, and Beauty is the rhapsodic head. Perhaps it has the face of someone who has been looking at the light captured inside Ann Robinson’s glass.”

Terry Stringer