Robyn Walton

‘An Equipment (life drawing)’, 2016; aluminium plate and mounting axle, 90 cm diameter; courtesy of the artist

‘please go round the back’, 2014; enamel on wood; courtesy of the artist

‘enhanced interrogation (detail)’, 2014; steel and found object; courtesy of the artist

‘freshen up’, 2014; enamel on wood; courtesy of the artist

‘Untitled (trolley)’, 2016; trolley wheels, TV aerial, aluminium, spacers, pipe mounting brackets, balun, coaxial cable, analogue CRT television and unidentified signal; courtesy of the artist

Robyn Walton is introduced by CORNER window gallery.

Robyn Walton, born 1969 New Zealand, following a career in architecture, is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) degree at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University, New Zealand.
Since commencing her move to visual art she has twice been a finalist in the Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Award (2014, 2016); and has exhibited at Whakatane Library and Exhibition Centre (2014, 2016), Studio One Toi Tū, Auckland (2014), and Projectspace Gallery, University of Auckland, Auckland (2015).

Robyn Walton’s art practice responds to everyday things and places in ways that seek to undermine their coherence to create a perception of ambiguity at the boundary between art and life; between art object and utilitarian object.

In her CORNER project, ‘SERIOUSLY, NO GOODBYES’ Walton constructed a series of same-sized, double-sided monochrome paintings panels that are hung by their long edge to protrude, perpendicular from the walls. Perception of the installation’s colour fields varies with each viewer’s angle and speed of movement past the street-side windows. Thus the work draws on, and extends, the motivations of artists in the early period of colour-field painting, including Donald Judd’s problem with the discipline of painting in which the rectangular plane on the wall “determines and limits the arrangement” of its surface, that it is spatial in the illusionistic sense but with an absence of real space.

In another recent work, her everyday starting point is the 1970s drawing toy Rotodraw, with which you drew around plastic stencil discs in a numbered order to make a picture; and the surprise drawings that emerged seemed to have no visual link to the disc itself. Walton observes the lines are floating in space; they seem to have lost their place. In ‘An Equipment’ (2016) Walton has ‘reverse engineered’ one of her own studio life-drawings to create a wall-mounted aluminium disc which she is then using to create drawing multiples.