Robert currently lives and works in Cornwall.  Locally he is well known for his large ‘Bombus Bee’ sculpture at the Eden Project, and for his pyrotechnical fire sculptures on Bodmin Moor.  His innovative sculpture has an international following and can be found in both public and private collections in the USA and Europe.  He tends to work in both two and three dimensions with groups of ideas in series.  His pieces can easily stand alone but work well grouped together.  Robert also undertakes large installation works and is available for private commissions.

Robert’s ideas come from a wide variety of sources, and include psychotherapeutic concepts ( the artist practised as a therapist for several years), the culture and climate of the time and physical experiments with matter and things.  Everything – fire, paint, objects, past and present aesthetics and styles, people, other species, the synthetic and natural world.  Robert considers all materials are potential sculpture and deals with them in a non-hierarchical way.

In 2004 Robert began experimenting with a series of sculptures which utilise plastic toys as their main modelling material, and which have now attracted consistent international attention.  He began screwing discarded children’s toys into wooden armatures, which proved both strong and highly adaptable as a method and gave rise to hugely colourful and quirky sculptures.  Works from this series have been showing in London, Bristol, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Flanders, Bangkok and, now, Stockbridge!   

Robert says of this series:   “For a long time now I have preferred to use materials that are not bland i.e. have some kind of history of weathering or use. One day about four years ago out in the studio I was looking into my childrens box of outgrown / discarded toys which happened to be stored in the same building and responded to the random collection of colours shapes and forms they made. I figured that if I could find a way of putting them together to constitute a larger form they would have great potential as larger scale sculpture.

The toys themselves interest me in their own right as mini sculptures by unknown and uncredited artists. Mostly I use the toys abstractly as forms with which to build muscle bone or internal or external organs but all types of human pursuits can be referred to and represented through them - things loved or hated - things used and carried as tools etc etc. They provide interest in surface detail whilst making their contribution to the totalities. The toys also provide a moving history of fads and fashions as they pass through the media and our awareness temporarily significant and then forgotten.

Public reaction to the sculptures has been largely very positive (in some cases gleeful)- often children drag their parents to come and look at the pieces and then a whole sequence of recognition and recollection usually begins, naming the various toys and recalling the times and circumstances of their use. There is usually some fascination with the sculptures, the individual toys used and with the process of their acquisition and construction. Sometimes there is outright laughter. There is usually a whole process of going back and forth between looking at the sculptures as a totality and the individual parts from which they are made (which of course is my intention). Some people of course just say they are rubbish which of course is perfectly true!

There is also often talk about consumerism waste and recycling, which whilst not being my central concern is also in my view positive when it occurs. Some find the sculptures beautiful/ curious/ scary/ weird/ emotional and etc. (which considering all they are really are, is bits of what is usually seen as trash) is great.  In a way the sculptures are also history pieces in the sense that you could date any one of them roughly speaking from the time that the last toy screwed on to the structure was produced.”