David Robinson

"I grew up in the 1960’s in a typical dysfunctional family in a small town in the Mississippi Delta. On one hand, the rural south was idyllic with woods and lakes to explore. On the other hand, it was also a time rife with deeply entrenched racism, homophobia and the ubiquitous hand of Christianity. The contrasts and contradictions of this time and place contributed greatly to my growth as a person and artist. Largely self-taught, my education was supplemented with a variety of workshops over the years and included classes at GSU (Drawing and Painting), Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Arrowmont, and Penland. My formal education includes an undergraduate degree in English and French and a graduate degree in Instructional Design. I enjoy participating in artist residencies around the US and world, when possible. These have included Hambidge Creative Residency Program, The Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts (Montana), Anderson Ranch (Colorado), Gaya Ceramic Arts (Bali), and Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center (Denmark).

Suggesting repositories of the debris left behind after receding flood waters, the sculptures in this series grew out of a period of reflection and exploration during the early days of the Covid pandemic. The individual, mostly hand-built ceramic components in the work, reference oceanic fragments along with bones, shards of broken clay vessels, and pieces of statuary from ancient civilizations. Juxtaposed against these artifacts and organic material, one will also discover bits of refuse and industrial waste, the detritus of our contemporary existence. The individual elements hover somewhere between growth and decay, representational and abstract, imagination and reality, between mass and void, and garbage and gods. The resulting dialogue of these incongruent objects is at the heart of the work, inviting the viewer to explore connections and to draw their own conclusions. What is to be made of the stream of history? What is left of us at the end of a millennium? What are we leaving behind? What is our legacy?  These questions and others speak vaguely to the elegiac, the ephemeral, and issues of mortality that are underlying themes in the work."