Artist: Ro Robertson

Maximillian William presents Holder Up, a new body of work by Ro Robertson, their third solo exhibition at the gallery. Drawing upon a working-class history of bodily engagement with the materials of heavy industry, Robertson channels the physicality of industrial labour through performance, drawing, riveted steel collage, and welded steel sculpture, reinterpreting its gestures into rhythmical abstract form.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from the artist’s great-grandfather’s role in the shipyards: a ‘Holder Up’ – someone who was responsible for bracing red-hot rivets in place while they were hammered overhead into steel structures. Within a contemplative process of working with generational memory, Robertson considers the sculptural legacy of working-class people.

Working-class people working in heavy industry learned more directly than anyone about a heightened awareness of force, scale and the relationship between body and material – I draw on this understanding which is embedded deeply in my sculptural practice.

Holding up, ascending and bearing weight – these gestures shape the works and the interplay between structure and movement. A pair of newly welded and riveted sculptures hold a percussive quality, reflecting the tempo of monumental graft. Formally the sculptures describe the space of two different sets of hands working in complete harmony – a joyous act of unity between body, metal and sound.

Robertson was born in Sunderland in 1984, and raised in a former miners’ cottage in Pallion, a tightly packed residential area close to the River Wear. Through abstraction, Robertson considers the shapes and structures that dominated Sunderland’s riverside and cultural identity, as well as the architectural and material histories of the region.

A tension between vulnerability and strength underpins Robertson’s engagement with material, where the opposing forces of rigid steel and fluid water become metaphors for the body’s capacity to endure, resist, and transform. Through an iterative process of layering, revealing, and erasure, the works summon ghosts of an industrial past, shifting from absence into form.

Holder Up revisits Robertson’s family history and working-class experience as a sculptural language, one that is re-examined through a queer feminist lens to subvert the rigid gendered associations of industry and materiality. Here, industrial labour is reclaimed as an embodied act: its weight felt, its gestures repeated, its history is held and carried forward through material and form.

Ro Robertson (they/them) (b. 1984, Sunderland, UK) is a contemporary artist based in West Cornwall. Robertson’s practice spans sculpture, drawing, painting and video, mediums through which they explore the boundaries of the human body and its environment.

Robertson works site specifically, often outdoors, with a multi-sensory focus on the body in the landscape. Unity between the material of the natural landscape and the body reclaims a space for LGBTQ+ identity against a history of being deemed ‘against nature’. Physical explorations of the natural landscape feed into ‘automatic’ abstract drawings and short mediative video works. Robertson’s large-scale sculptures embed the fluidity of this cyclical practice into rigid and industrial materials such as Corten steel and marine paint, materials that bridge their family heritage of ship building and their sculptural practice.

Robertson’s collective body of welded abstract steel sculptures, Interlude II, is included in the group show Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes at The Hepworth Wakefield until spring 2025 and touring to The Box, Plymouth and Museum Arnhem, Netherlands later this year. Modern Thresholds: Ro Robertson, a site-responsive display of drawing and sculpture is also currently on view at Tate St Ives until December 2025. Robertson’s public sculpture Drench, inspired by the energy of the tidal zone, was exhibited in Regent’s Park, London as part of Frieze Sculpture 2022 and is now on view at the Sainsbury Centre’s Sculpture Park. Robertson’s first public sculpture Stone (Butch) was installed at London’s iconic Gherkin skyscraper 2021-22, commissioned for the 10th edition of ‘Sculpture in the City’. Stone (Butch) is now installed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, where is it part of the permanent collection. Past solo presentations include Torsos, Maximillian William, London and Subterrane, Maximillian William, London. Past group exhibitions include Dreaming of Home at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York curated by Gemma Rolls- Bentley; WINK WINK, Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery, Rossendale; We Are Floating In Space, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, Newlyn / Penzance; TRICKSTER FIGURES: sculpture and the body curated by Jes Fernie at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; Behind abstract forms, Fragment, New York; On Queer Ground, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Seen, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange; Into Abstraction, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield and Exploratory Drawings, Maximillian William, London. Works by Robertson are also held in the collection of the British Museum, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, The Hepworth Wakefield and Leeds Museums & Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery). In 2025 Wakefield Council will unveil a newly commissioned monumental, site-specific work by Ro Robertson following four public sculpture commissions in Wakefield city by leading British artists.