Ro Robertson: The Ribs Begin to Rise

ARTIST NEWS

Ro Robertson’s first institutional solo exhibition at The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland is now open. The show features a newly commissioned series of sculptural works alongside large-scale drawings and a video installation.

Staged on the banks of the River Wear in Robertson’s hometown of Sunderland, The Ribs Begin to Rise takes inspiration from its location. It draws on the mouth of the River Wear, Sunderland Docks, Hendon Paper Works, the ropeworks and the 700 female shipbuilders who lived and worked in Sunderland. The exhibition reflects on Robertson’s family working-class history and the materials key to the industries which came to define Robertson’s upbringing and the region.

The Ribs Begin to Rise aims to revise how Robertson’s working-class experience has influenced their sculptural understanding and how a queer feminist lens can reframe the rigid gender associations of sculpture and industry.

The title The Ribs Begin to Rise is a line from a shipbuilding magazine from the ‘40s which includes a really beautiful and poetic description of the life of a ship being built and launched. The ribs rising is in reference to the first stage of the ship taking place. I was struck by this very bodily term for a monumental structure, for me it has a double meaning which also connects with our own ribs rising as we take breath. When we breathe half of our oxygen comes from the sea which puts us in an interconnected cycle with water and the earth. This cycle between body, water and industrial material is embedded within my new installation combining steel sculpture, video and sound. The video and sound elements were recorded on a walk from the site of Pallion shipyards to Roker. I grew up in Pallion and I remember the sense of freedom of first walking down the River Wear to Roker myself, so I wanted to connect these two places in my work. My approach has been semi improvised in the sense that I wanted to be guided by the landscape, I was drawn to the rewilding of the post industrial riverside in this period of transition for the city. The wildflowers became a metaphor for strength and resilience. The simple structure of grasses and wildflowers that grow in-between human industrious activity always find a way to find light and grow.

There’s a section called Holder Up [in the exhibition], that was my great grandfather’s job title in the shipyards. The holder up would have held rivets in place whilst they were hammered in overhead. I was just really struck by the job title Holder Up, how it’s such a physical act and how it would have defined a person’s whole life.

Holder Up has these physical connections with material, but also I like it as a metaphor of bearing weight, holding onto something quite heavy, but also upholding something at the same time in terms of what’s carried on through generations. Some of the structures from the shipyards are still there, but there’s lots of new landscaping going on down the river and there’s such a contrast between different generations and how both the river and people’s well-being is cared for. I want to uphold what past generations did for us, we can’t forget what they’re hard work meant as we step forward.

The sculpture titled Holder Up has two different energy forces happening at the same time which is what it can feel like sometimes when a city is changing.

Other works [in the exhibition] are very much inspired by the female shipbuilders who worked in Sunderland. There was a moment when I learned about the women who worked in the shipyards that completely changed my own relationship with materials. The women in industry weren’t well documented, and if there were queer people and non-binary people working in any part of these industries our histories are always erased anyway so that’s not documented either. It was mainly during World War II when the 700 women worked in the shipyards. The rhetoric is that it was only because it was emergency, but I think the reality would have been that some women and some people would have worked in that environment for the first time and completely thrived in that environment, because they would have had a connection with their own physicality in ways that they weren’t otherwise allowed. I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t have been an artist, that I shouldn’t be welding as a working-class Queer woman and so I would like to dedicate this show to all the women of Sunderland who fought - and who continue to fight – for freedoms during restrictive times.

My works on paper are made in an automatic and abstract way with the aim of capturing a sense of a place. Often, I take studies outside or I begin the work outside. For The Ribs Begin to Rise I made some new drawings and paintings based on a walk from Pallion to Roker, I produced some en plein air at Roker beach and others after I had been swimming in the North Sea. My large gouache on paper titled The Plunge was made in my studio in St Ives based on the memory of the River Wear and I was thinking of the act of the water separating as a ship is launched into ‘the plunge’

One of the things that I’ve really connected with by being back in Sunderland is the rewilding of the landscape around where the shipyards were. I was down at a pub called the Saltgrass with my dad - the Saltgrass is right near where Laing Shipyard was – hearing stories about how I used to get taken there in the pushchair when I was crying. These are the places where life happened and now they’re like museums with the whole history of the area on the walls. My new work on paper titled Saltgrass references both the salt tolerant grass that grew all along the river banks before the shipyards and is dedicated to the many excellent pubs in Sunderland, many of which my Nanna worked in and is who I think of when I think of real strength through the industrial period I have been reflecting on.