Robyn Woolston
Artist in Residence
Woolston is a visual artist who works across installation, photography, moving image and print. Often working in non-gallery spaces, across community settings and within archives or sites of listed significance. Her practice generates frameworks for discursive reflection, focusing upon structures, environments and mechanisms that engender ecological and emotional recovery via public realm interventions, socially engaged practice and site-specific responses. In 2022 she presented a solo show at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts that embodied the culmination of three years of research and collaboration between the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, the TCU (Texas Christian University) department of Psychology and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. Her work is held within public and private collections, as well as reference libraries (including the British Library).
“The Gdańsk residency marked a critical juncture in my practice; grounding it in a city shaped by resistance, renewal and the cyclical interplay of land-and-sea. Subsequently, through EDGELAND (2024), I sited my action-research at the intersection of rising tides – asking how sites of historical struggle might inform contemporary environmental practice in the face of rapid change.
Upon my return, this inquiry into collective resilience, prefigured a more personal rupture: a brain tumour diagnosis that redirected my focus inwards. Framing the body as a site of ecological perception and embodied vulnerability. From this shift, SWELL (an Artist Bookwork, in progress) emerges as a response – recasting care, both personal and planetary, as a political methodology. Informed by the solidarities observed in Gdańsk, and shaped by the urgencies of survival, the work asks: How might Radical Care function as both method and ethic in times of systemic collapse?’
Feel free to work with my FB ‘pinned’ post if you prefer:
‘To understand the complexity of a brain tumour in an individual is to look inward, to examine the minutiae of cells and neurones at odds. When we reflect, in parallel, on environmental shifts, such as the slow encroachment of rising tides or the warming of the atmosphere, we must ask: What if our personal health is not a solitary issue? Perhaps it is intricately woven into the broader fabric of a planet in distress. Our health and the health of the Earth are not separate; they are interdependent. When we approach this duality with empathy – toward both our own bodies and the ecosystems that sustain us – we create an opportunity for healing not just on a personal level, but on a planetary one. Multi-species flourishing is not a distant ideal; it is a necessary framework for both individual and collective thriving in a rapidly changing world.”
