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2009

Sunday Herald - The Art of Being Invisible

You may already have seen some of Kate V Robertson’s contribution to the Edinburgh Art Festival … you just wouldn’t know it. By Sarah Urwin Jones

THE IDEA of art designed not to be noticed might strike most people as a rather futile endeavour. Why spend hours conceiving, creating and fashioning something if most of your potential viewing public aren't even going to notice it's there?

It's a question one might rightly ask of Kate V Robertson, an up-and-coming young artist who has just completed her MFA at Glasgow School of Art, and whose contribution to the line-up for the forthcoming Edinburgh Art Festival - Notices - is a guerrilla-ish show about town. Or a non-show, to be more specific.

Described as "invisible graffiti ... either happened upon by the observant passer-by, or sought out by the inquisitive Festival spectator", her works will be abstracted to the extent that they contain "no lucid message", mounted on temporary walls (of which Edinburgh currently has no shortage) and deliberately, deeply unnoticeable - unless you happen to be on the lookout for something to notice.

"There's every possibility that they're going to get overlooked altogether," Robertson says, admitting that the whole concept is, indeed, potentially quite futile. "But is there any more point to getting something exhibited in a small gallery which only 30 people will see? You start thinking: what's the point of anything?"

If this thought suggests a closet anarchist, or indeed depressive, Robertson disappoints. While her work has a political undercurrent, it is now of a far more subtle hue than the sloganed work she experimented with at art school.

"If you use slogans, I think you have to subvert them somehow, and while I'm interested in subversion, I don't have a cause to fight," she says. "For me, it's more about political context than content, and questioning the usefulness of political communication and demonstrations in the form of flags and placards. I'm interested in what those very simple forms suggest of themselves, and whether the people using them actually have anything to say. But I'm not cynical. I'm not saying don't bother."

Born and raised in Edinburgh, Robertson was never sure that she was going to be an artist, although it was her best subject when at James Gillespie's High School. Her early political tendencies left her struggling: "I was quite anti doing anything institutional. I knew academia wasn't for me, but it took a little while to realise that art school was a good alternative."

Working across all media - originally photography - Robertson's work rarely takes the same form from one project to the next, although her subject matter is consistent: "I thought it was something to do with youth, with being at an early stage in my career, but I think it's more to do with how I am. I get bored easily. I like lots of different art. The more you evolve as an artist, the better you know yourself and your practice. Now that I recognise I'm not a highly skilled craftsman, that it's all a bit makeshift and provisional, I come to use it as part of the content."

Robertson's artistic influences for this project range from Francis Alys (the paradox between the political and the poetical), Arte Povera (an influential 1960s movement which questioned institutional authority and the validity of art as individual expression) and Keith Wilson ("an artist dealing with a kind of nothingness"). There are precedents in her own work. Last year, on an exchange in New York as part of her MFA, Robertson mounted a series of subtle abstract wooden "posters" on a temporary wooden wall in Times Square.

"I thought it wouldn't last half an hour," she says, realising that her choice of location was somewhat audacious. "But it was still there two months later."

As with Times Square, Robertson has not sought any permission to put up her work in Edinburgh this summer, although she will provide a map. There is the very real possibility that the work may be taken down, or indeed flyered over by the plethora of Fringe shows desperately seeking audiences. However, the ability to respond to this is part of its attraction: "That's the good thing about being local."

Despite her cloak and dagger ways, Robertson is a rather polite guerilla. "I have a strange, quite contradictory approach to these things. I like to do things that are unauthorised, but at the same time I'm not a vandal, I don't want to damage some nice Edinburgh building. And I don't want to get arrested. If I'm stopped, I'll just say the art festival said I could do it!'"

But Robertson doesn't foresee too many problems of that sort. "I think as long as you look purposeful doing something, no-one really questions it." As to the response her work might elicit, she says: "People might not even think it's art. They might just do a bit of a double take, might think that's not functional, that's not accidental - what is it?'. And that will be enough for me. Just a slight disruption ..."

Notices by Kate V Robertson will appear at various locations throughout Edinburgh, August 5-September 5

Reviews 

2006

a-n magazine - Review of 'Comfort' by Ken Neil

2005

The Times - Top 5 Exhibitions in Scotland listing for 'Preserve Rock and Roll'

The List - Listing and picture for 'Preserve Rock and Roll'

2004

Sunday Herald - Review of 'Below The Root' by Catriona Black

2003

The Herald - Review of Degree Show by Moira Jeffrey

"...From Celia Hempton's prize-winning paintings, which featured forbidden or circumscribed areas...to the words "Civil Disobedience" spelled out in spaghetti hoops by Kate Robertson.

The same artist has a wonderful photo pf a Rubik's cube in which the coloured panels appeared to have been torn off and stuck back on in a new sequence, emblematic of frustration. By the end of all this emotion, I would have been happy to refer to the vast pile of self-help books she has wittily stacked in the corner from What to do in an Emergency to The Women's Book of Courage."