Rock Portraits
Kim Robertson
Screenprints with ground rock on paper, 2023
Digital prints on paper, 2023
All nature has a soul.
Many Indigenous tribes refer to rocks as ‘rock beings’ and work with these rock beings for healing and knowledge. Not only precious rocks, or crystals, but the rocks that we might perceive as ‘ordinary’. When we sit quietly and hold these rocks with deep respect, they can impart their wisdom of nature and the endless cycles of this planet.
They can also help to unravel answers to questions that sit deep within us and offer guidance in our daily lives.
Through various engagements with rocks, this research explores the animist belief that the rock has a soul. The works are attempting to break down this notion and analyse what this means; to make the unseen visible and reveal the soul of the rock through artmaking. The research currently takes three forms of exploration: Rock Portraits, Colour Studies, and Rock Etchings.
Locate: Building C3, 1st Floor, next to Room 165 and Room 176
about the artist
Kim Robertson is a visual artist whose work encompasses drawing, the digital image, printmaking, installation and video. Her work revolves around territories, both physical, and of the mind and she holds a belief that we do not fully engage with the power of our minds, nor fully embrace what it is to be human. She has been researching belief systems that bring us closer to our planetary environment, in the hope that we can engage with it at a deeper level in order to perform acts on remediation. She exhibits internationally and presented a solo show in the NYUAD Project Space in 2018. Residencies she has participated in include exploring the themes of Isolation and Darkness, Remote Island Communities and more recently Plastic Pollution, and The Climate Crisis.