Glimmers: Solo exhibition

Yasmine Robinson; Catherine  Hemelryk; Sam Cornish

Glimmers: Solo exhibition

Yasmine Robinson (Artist)
, Catherine Hemelryk (Curator)
, Sam Cornish (Other)

CCA Derry-Londonderry

Research output: Non-textual form › Exhibition

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Abstract

The solo exhibition, Glimmers, presented a new body of work at CCA Derry~Londonderry (28 March – 6 June 2026). The exhibition extended Yasmine Robinson's ongoing practice-led research into abstraction as an embodied and responsive process, exploring materiality, form and the phenomenological potential of painting. Through colour, surface and gesture, the works examine how perception, memory and lived experience might be materially articulated through the language of paint.

The research investigates how emotional and sensory experiences that resist straightforward verbal articulation might be communicated through the material language of paint, positioning abstraction as a means of engaging lived experience through embodied forms of knowledge, where painting operates not as a fixed image but as an active process shaped through accumulation, resistance and transformation.

The exhibition extended this enquiry into spatial and architectural conditions, with sections of the gallery walls painted blue in order to extend chromatic concerns beyond the surface of the canvas and activate the exhibition space as an immersive field of perception. This intervention draws upon historical and material associations with blue in abstraction, from Wassily Kandinsky’s writings on colour and spiritual experience within Der Blaue Reiter, through the immersive chromatic environments of post-war abstraction and the material investigations of Yves Klein, where colour operates as affective and spatial presence rather than representation.

The spatial arrangement of the works further expanded painting into architectural and embodied terms, with works installed at varying heights in order to disrupt conventional viewing positions, alongside standalone walls used to echo the three-dimensional, stuffed qualities of the paintings, encouraging the viewer to physically and perceptually engage with the work. Painted surfaces were also extended into transitional areas, including the corridor between Gallery 2 and Gallery 3, where the exhibition environment itself became continuous with the work.

Research undertaken during the development of Glimmers extended beyond the studio through engagement with exhibitions concerned with the continuing relevance of abstraction, including a research visit to London supported by Ulster University funding, which included the group exhibition RUNES at OHSH Projects in March 2026. This visit was prompted by an initial encounter with John Hoyland’s painting 'Don’t Explain' (1983), acrylic on canvas (244 × 228.5 cm), first experienced in his studio in November 2025 and later re-encountered within the curated context of RUNES, where the movement between studio and exhibition conditions foregrounded how abstraction shifts meaning through different spatial and institutional framings.

Robinson’s particular interest in Hoyland’s practice in the 1980s, characterised by materially responsive processes such as pouring, splashing and the use of gravity and resistance, informs works that move between sensuous bodily reference and more expansive compositional forms. This engagement informed Robinson’s own material approach within Glimmers, particularly in the use of paint to produce inflated form and material physicality, alongside an expanded painting practice that extends into architectural space.

RUNES situates mark-making within a broader cultural continuum, framing abstraction as a visual language that evolves across generations rather than belonging to a single historical moment, an approach that aligns with Robinson’s own interest in mark-making as gesture, record and proposition.

This intergenerational framework also informs engagement with John Hoyland more broadly, emerging from an earlier exhibition in which Robinson’s work was shown alongside Hoyland’s 'Spirit of Venu's (1988) at group exhibition 'Stelltundra' at Sim Smith, London (2023) , and further developed through research visit to his London studio, while collaboration with writer and curator Sam Cornish, who is also involved with the John Hoyland Estate, situates this research within an expanded critical discourse on post-war abstraction and its contemporary relevance.

See also research carried out in the paintings 'Jelly Ear', 2023 and 'Butterbur', 2023 produced as part of Stelltundra at Sim Smith, London.

A further strand of the research addresses the position of women painters within post-war and contemporary abstraction, examining questions of visibility, material authorship and historical marginalisation, informed by engagement with artists such as Gabriele Münter and early twentieth-century abstraction, and further articulated through participation in CCA Derry~Londonderry Roundtable Podcast #12.

Works presented within this exhibition:

Gallery 1
Stone Lips (2026), oil on canvas
Selfie Graveyard (2025), oil on canvas
Fruitshop (2022), oil, acrylic, emulsion and collage on stuffed canvas

Gallery 2
Eask Tower (2026), soft pastel on paper
Pear Drop (2026), soft pastel on paper
Ladybird (2026), soft pastel on paper
Heart – Star – Moon (2026), soft pastel on paper
Duckworth (2026), soft pastel on paper
Teardrop (In an Ocean) (2026), oil and flashe on canvas
Inner Ears (2024), oil and collage on stuffed canvas
Thin Place (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas
Dry-Arch (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas
Starboard (2026), oil and flashe on canvas

Gallery 3
Silver Lining (2026), oil on stuffed canvas
Wishbone (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas
Moon River (2025), oil on canvas
Slea Head (2026), oil on canvas

This research positions Glimmers as an investigation into painting as a materially responsive, spatially expanded and historically situated practice in which abstraction operates simultaneously as embodied process, environmental condition and evolving cultural language.

Original language	English
Size	Dimensions variable
Publication status	Published (in print/issue) - 28 Mar 2026

Bibliographical note

Exhibition Text

Mixed Messages: New Paintings by Yasmine Robinson - Written by Sam Cornish

Yasmine Robinson’s art is a kind of juggling act. The objects involved are ambiguous, with slippery identities, liable to change. Suggestions of a pair of lips, an orange, a hillside, a wonky starfish, a set of upright standing stones, appear alongside elements more fully abstract, or at least less nameable. The game she plays with these objects, to mix metaphors, is a little like hide and seek. Her images are bold and joyful, even naive in their presentation, but looking slightly longer there is always something withheld, a space glimpsed which her crowds of objects prevent us fully seeing. This denial acts like an invitation, an encouragement to keep looking, but it also enriches her paintings with a sense of unease. As she said to me while we were looking at the work to be included in this exhibition, “there is always some part of yourself that is unknowable.”

Part of their slipperiness is to do with scale. We might think we are dealing with something as large and distant as a landscape or as close and intimate as a still-life. Or perhaps what we see is a landscape shrunk so it is almost (never quite) within our grasp, or a still-life whose constituent elements have been inflated, made monumental. Reality and directness are often combined with the sense that the objects she describes have been pumped-up, into dream-like, air-filled absurdity. Emojis are a source for some of Robinson’s motifs, including the hearts in her earlier painting Fruitshop (2022). This painting reminded me of the video for Roger Sanchez’s Another Chance (2001), where a young woman’s search for love is externalised in form of an expanding and deflating heart, that she awkwardly carries around New York. Robinson’s images move in the opposite direction, subsuming external, partly pop-cultural cues within the clutter and shadows of inner feeling. How do we navigate our emotional responses using the images the contemporary environment provides us with?

The same mixed messages apply to the paintings’ ambiguous sensuality. This is overtly signalled by the lips (another emoji-motif) that appear in Selfie Graveyard, Stone Lips and Duckworth but found is more generally across the paintings as a group, in their hidden spaces and their closely packed, curving forms. Robinson is highly aware of the demands placed on women to package their physicality, to limit it, make it attractive and contained within convention. Painting here is perhaps in part an escape into another, more fully realised, less regulated sense of physicality, even as they acknowledge the wider situation they move away from.

Over the last few years many of Robinson’s paintings have been literally inflated, the canvas stuffed with wool, so that their edges and surface push beyond the picture’s traditional flatness. Inner Ears, the oldest painting shown here, is a good example. Its bulging front is covered with shapes that are sometimes just swipes of impasto paint, sometimes forms simplistically modelled with light and shade, and in one instance, a piece of canvas collaged onto the surface. The point is not, I’m sure, to advance an academic argument about contradictory languages of illusion in painting, but to use this contradiction to provoke a feeling in the viewer, even if this feeling’s identity is itself hard to pin down. In her new paintings, Robinson has moved away from the stuffed canvas. She thinks it restricted the ability of the viewer to move around her paintings’ spaces. The larger new paintings have a new confidence in their image-making, although for me some of the smaller works are the most compelling, with their subtler, sometimes silvery colour, and more distanced, more fully contained forms. Looking at Selfie Graveyard or Stone Lips, after time spent with the brash colour of paintings such as Moon River or Silver Lining, I noticed my eyes adjusting, as if I have moved from a bright outside into a twilight room.

As with many painters today, Robinson has a personal engagement with the history of modern painting, a sort of pick and mix canon, that she does not necessarily share with her immediate peers. John Hoyland is important to her, particularly his referentially ambivalent paintings of the 1980s, as are the quasi-figurative abstractions works of Howard Hodgkin, his earlier painting in particular. Perhaps more crucial is the example of early twentieth-century expressionists such as Gabriele Munter or, especially, Alexej von Jawlensky. These artists, with their near prismatic colour and roughly hewn, simplified forms, come from a moment when a language of abstract art was being formed and had not yet evolved into fixed positions. I think the non-dogmatic flexibility this offers is part of the attraction to Robinson, as is their beguiling mix of the prosaic and the otherworldly.

Funding

This project was supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Derry City & Strabane District Council, Garfield Weston Foundation and Ulster University UoA32 Strategic Funding

Keywords

Contemporary abstraction
contemporary art
Contemporary painting
Abstraction
practice based research
Visual art
Materiality
Gesture
Exhibition
Woman artist
Northern Ireland
abstract painting
Post-war abstraction
Intergenerational abstraction
Abstract Expressionism
Art history and practice
Representation in contemporary art
Visibility and authorship

Access to Document

Cite this

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title = "Glimmers: Solo exhibition",

abstract = "The solo exhibition, Glimmers, presented a new body of work at CCA Derry\textasciitilde{}Londonderry (28 March – 6 June 2026). The exhibition extended Yasmine Robinson's ongoing practice-led research into abstraction as an embodied and responsive process, exploring materiality, form and the phenomenological potential of painting. Through colour, surface and gesture, the works examine how perception, memory and lived experience might be materially articulated through the language of paint. The research investigates how emotional and sensory experiences that resist straightforward verbal articulation might be communicated through the material language of paint, positioning abstraction as a means of engaging lived experience through embodied forms of knowledge, where painting operates not as a fixed image but as an active process shaped through accumulation, resistance and transformation. The exhibition extended this enquiry into spatial and architectural conditions, with sections of the gallery walls painted blue in order to extend chromatic concerns beyond the surface of the canvas and activate the exhibition space as an immersive field of perception. This intervention draws upon historical and material associations with blue in abstraction, from Wassily Kandinsky{\textquoteright}s writings on colour and spiritual experience within Der Blaue Reiter, through the immersive chromatic environments of post-war abstraction and the material investigations of Yves Klein, where colour operates as affective and spatial presence rather than representation. The spatial arrangement of the works further expanded painting into architectural and embodied terms, with works installed at varying heights in order to disrupt conventional viewing positions, alongside standalone walls used to echo the three-dimensional, stuffed qualities of the paintings, encouraging the viewer to physically and perceptually engage with the work. Painted surfaces were also extended into transitional areas, including the corridor between Gallery 2 and Gallery 3, where the exhibition environment itself became continuous with the work. Research undertaken during the development of Glimmers extended beyond the studio through engagement with exhibitions concerned with the continuing relevance of abstraction, including a research visit to London supported by Ulster University funding, which included the group exhibition RUNES at OHSH Projects in March 2026. This visit was prompted by an initial encounter with John Hoyland{\textquoteright}s painting 'Don{\textquoteright}t Explain' (1983), acrylic on canvas (244 × 228.5 cm), first experienced in his studio in November 2025 and later re-encountered within the curated context of RUNES, where the movement between studio and exhibition conditions foregrounded how abstraction shifts meaning through different spatial and institutional framings. Robinson{\textquoteright}s particular interest in Hoyland{\textquoteright}s practice in the 1980s, characterised by materially responsive processes such as pouring, splashing and the use of gravity and resistance, informs works that move between sensuous bodily reference and more expansive compositional forms. This engagement informed Robinson{\textquoteright}s own material approach within Glimmers, particularly in the use of paint to produce inflated form and material physicality, alongside an expanded painting practice that extends into architectural space. RUNES situates mark-making within a broader cultural continuum, framing abstraction as a visual language that evolves across generations rather than belonging to a single historical moment, an approach that aligns with Robinson{\textquoteright}s own interest in mark-making as gesture, record and proposition. This intergenerational framework also informs engagement with John Hoyland more broadly, emerging from an earlier exhibition in which Robinson{\textquoteright}s work was shown alongside Hoyland{\textquoteright}s 'Spirit of Venu's (1988) at group exhibition 'Stelltundra' at Sim Smith, London (2023) , and further developed through research visit to his London studio, while collaboration with writer and curator Sam Cornish, who is also involved with the John Hoyland Estate, situates this research within an expanded critical discourse on post-war abstraction and its contemporary relevance. See also research carried out in the paintings 'Jelly Ear', 2023 and 'Butterbur', 2023 produced as part of Stelltundra at Sim Smith, London. A further strand of the research addresses the position of women painters within post-war and contemporary abstraction, examining questions of visibility, material authorship and historical marginalisation, informed by engagement with artists such as Gabriele M{\"u}nter and early twentieth-century abstraction, and further articulated through participation in CCA Derry\textasciitilde{}Londonderry Roundtable Podcast \#12. Works presented within this exhibition: Gallery 1 Stone Lips (2026), oil on canvas Selfie Graveyard (2025), oil on canvas Fruitshop (2022), oil, acrylic, emulsion and collage on stuffed canvas Gallery 2 Eask Tower (2026), soft pastel on paper Pear Drop (2026), soft pastel on paper Ladybird (2026), soft pastel on paper Heart – Star – Moon (2026), soft pastel on paper Duckworth (2026), soft pastel on paper Teardrop (In an Ocean) (2026), oil and flashe on canvas Inner Ears (2024), oil and collage on stuffed canvas Thin Place (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Dry-Arch (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Starboard (2026), oil and flashe on canvas Gallery 3 Silver Lining (2026), oil on stuffed canvas Wishbone (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Moon River (2025), oil on canvas Slea Head (2026), oil on canvas This research positions Glimmers as an investigation into painting as a materially responsive, spatially expanded and historically situated practice in which abstraction operates simultaneously as embodied process, environmental condition and evolving cultural language. ",

keywords = "Contemporary abstraction, contemporary art, Contemporary painting, Abstraction, practice based research, Visual art, Materiality, Gesture, Exhibition, Woman artist, Northern Ireland, abstract painting, Post-war abstraction, Intergenerational abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Art history and practice, Representation in contemporary art, Visibility and authorship",

author = "Yasmine Robinson and Catherine Hemelryk and Sam Cornish",

note = "Exhibition Text Mixed Messages: New Paintings by Yasmine Robinson - Written by Sam Cornish Yasmine Robinson{\textquoteright}s art is a kind of juggling act. The objects involved are ambiguous, with slippery identities, liable to change. Suggestions of a pair of lips, an orange, a hillside, a wonky starfish, a set of upright standing stones, appear alongside elements more fully abstract, or at least less nameable. The game she plays with these objects, to mix metaphors, is a little like hide and seek. Her images are bold and joyful, even naive in their presentation, but looking slightly longer there is always something withheld, a space glimpsed which her crowds of objects prevent us fully seeing. This denial acts like an invitation, an encouragement to keep looking, but it also enriches her paintings with a sense of unease. As she said to me while we were looking at the work to be included in this exhibition, “there is always some part of yourself that is unknowable.” Part of their slipperiness is to do with scale. We might think we are dealing with something as large and distant as a landscape or as close and intimate as a still-life. Or perhaps what we see is a landscape shrunk so it is almost (never quite) within our grasp, or a still-life whose constituent elements have been inflated, made monumental. Reality and directness are often combined with the sense that the objects she describes have been pumped-up, into dream-like, air-filled absurdity. Emojis are a source for some of Robinson{\textquoteright}s motifs, including the hearts in her earlier painting Fruitshop (2022). This painting reminded me of the video for Roger Sanchez{\textquoteright}s Another Chance (2001), where a young woman{\textquoteright}s search for love is externalised in form of an expanding and deflating heart, that she awkwardly carries around New York. Robinson{\textquoteright}s images move in the opposite direction, subsuming external, partly pop-cultural cues within the clutter and shadows of inner feeling. How do we navigate our emotional responses using the images the contemporary environment provides us with? The same mixed messages apply to the paintings{\textquoteright} ambiguous sensuality. This is overtly signalled by the lips (another emoji-motif) that appear in Selfie Graveyard, Stone Lips and Duckworth but found is more generally across the paintings as a group, in their hidden spaces and their closely packed, curving forms. Robinson is highly aware of the demands placed on women to package their physicality, to limit it, make it attractive and contained within convention. Painting here is perhaps in part an escape into another, more fully realised, less regulated sense of physicality, even as they acknowledge the wider situation they move away from. Over the last few years many of Robinson{\textquoteright}s paintings have been literally inflated, the canvas stuffed with wool, so that their edges and surface push beyond the picture{\textquoteright}s traditional flatness. Inner Ears, the oldest painting shown here, is a good example. Its bulging front is covered with shapes that are sometimes just swipes of impasto paint, sometimes forms simplistically modelled with light and shade, and in one instance, a piece of canvas collaged onto the surface. The point is not, I{\textquoteright}m sure, to advance an academic argument about contradictory languages of illusion in painting, but to use this contradiction to provoke a feeling in the viewer, even if this feeling{\textquoteright}s identity is itself hard to pin down. In her new paintings, Robinson has moved away from the stuffed canvas. She thinks it restricted the ability of the viewer to move around her paintings{\textquoteright} spaces. The larger new paintings have a new confidence in their image-making, although for me some of the smaller works are the most compelling, with their subtler, sometimes silvery colour, and more distanced, more fully contained forms. Looking at Selfie Graveyard or Stone Lips, after time spent with the brash colour of paintings such as Moon River or Silver Lining, I noticed my eyes adjusting, as if I have moved from a bright outside into a twilight room. As with many painters today, Robinson has a personal engagement with the history of modern painting, a sort of pick and mix canon, that she does not necessarily share with her immediate peers. John Hoyland is important to her, particularly his referentially ambivalent paintings of the 1980s, as are the quasi-figurative abstractions works of Howard Hodgkin, his earlier painting in particular. Perhaps more crucial is the example of early twentieth-century expressionists such as Gabriele Munter or, especially, Alexej von Jawlensky. These artists, with their near prismatic colour and roughly hewn, simplified forms, come from a moment when a language of abstract art was being formed and had not yet evolved into fixed positions. I think the non-dogmatic flexibility this offers is part of the attraction to Robinson, as is their beguiling mix of the prosaic and the otherworldly.",

year = "2026",

month = mar,

day = "28",

language = "English",

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TY - ADVS

T1 - Glimmers

T2 - Solo exhibition

A2 - Robinson, Yasmine

A2 - Hemelryk, Catherine

A2 - Cornish , Sam

N1 - Exhibition Text Mixed Messages: New Paintings by Yasmine Robinson - Written by Sam Cornish Yasmine Robinson’s art is a kind of juggling act. The objects involved are ambiguous, with slippery identities, liable to change. Suggestions of a pair of lips, an orange, a hillside, a wonky starfish, a set of upright standing stones, appear alongside elements more fully abstract, or at least less nameable. The game she plays with these objects, to mix metaphors, is a little like hide and seek. Her images are bold and joyful, even naive in their presentation, but looking slightly longer there is always something withheld, a space glimpsed which her crowds of objects prevent us fully seeing. This denial acts like an invitation, an encouragement to keep looking, but it also enriches her paintings with a sense of unease. As she said to me while we were looking at the work to be included in this exhibition, “there is always some part of yourself that is unknowable.” Part of their slipperiness is to do with scale. We might think we are dealing with something as large and distant as a landscape or as close and intimate as a still-life. Or perhaps what we see is a landscape shrunk so it is almost (never quite) within our grasp, or a still-life whose constituent elements have been inflated, made monumental. Reality and directness are often combined with the sense that the objects she describes have been pumped-up, into dream-like, air-filled absurdity. Emojis are a source for some of Robinson’s motifs, including the hearts in her earlier painting Fruitshop (2022). This painting reminded me of the video for Roger Sanchez’s Another Chance (2001), where a young woman’s search for love is externalised in form of an expanding and deflating heart, that she awkwardly carries around New York. Robinson’s images move in the opposite direction, subsuming external, partly pop-cultural cues within the clutter and shadows of inner feeling. How do we navigate our emotional responses using the images the contemporary environment provides us with? The same mixed messages apply to the paintings’ ambiguous sensuality. This is overtly signalled by the lips (another emoji-motif) that appear in Selfie Graveyard, Stone Lips and Duckworth but found is more generally across the paintings as a group, in their hidden spaces and their closely packed, curving forms. Robinson is highly aware of the demands placed on women to package their physicality, to limit it, make it attractive and contained within convention. Painting here is perhaps in part an escape into another, more fully realised, less regulated sense of physicality, even as they acknowledge the wider situation they move away from. Over the last few years many of Robinson’s paintings have been literally inflated, the canvas stuffed with wool, so that their edges and surface push beyond the picture’s traditional flatness. Inner Ears, the oldest painting shown here, is a good example. Its bulging front is covered with shapes that are sometimes just swipes of impasto paint, sometimes forms simplistically modelled with light and shade, and in one instance, a piece of canvas collaged onto the surface. The point is not, I’m sure, to advance an academic argument about contradictory languages of illusion in painting, but to use this contradiction to provoke a feeling in the viewer, even if this feeling’s identity is itself hard to pin down. In her new paintings, Robinson has moved away from the stuffed canvas. She thinks it restricted the ability of the viewer to move around her paintings’ spaces. The larger new paintings have a new confidence in their image-making, although for me some of the smaller works are the most compelling, with their subtler, sometimes silvery colour, and more distanced, more fully contained forms. Looking at Selfie Graveyard or Stone Lips, after time spent with the brash colour of paintings such as Moon River or Silver Lining, I noticed my eyes adjusting, as if I have moved from a bright outside into a twilight room. As with many painters today, Robinson has a personal engagement with the history of modern painting, a sort of pick and mix canon, that she does not necessarily share with her immediate peers. John Hoyland is important to her, particularly his referentially ambivalent paintings of the 1980s, as are the quasi-figurative abstractions works of Howard Hodgkin, his earlier painting in particular. Perhaps more crucial is the example of early twentieth-century expressionists such as Gabriele Munter or, especially, Alexej von Jawlensky. These artists, with their near prismatic colour and roughly hewn, simplified forms, come from a moment when a language of abstract art was being formed and had not yet evolved into fixed positions. I think the non-dogmatic flexibility this offers is part of the attraction to Robinson, as is their beguiling mix of the prosaic and the otherworldly.

PY - 2026/3/28

Y1 - 2026/3/28

N2 - The solo exhibition, Glimmers, presented a new body of work at CCA Derry~Londonderry (28 March – 6 June 2026). The exhibition extended Yasmine Robinson's ongoing practice-led research into abstraction as an embodied and responsive process, exploring materiality, form and the phenomenological potential of painting. Through colour, surface and gesture, the works examine how perception, memory and lived experience might be materially articulated through the language of paint. The research investigates how emotional and sensory experiences that resist straightforward verbal articulation might be communicated through the material language of paint, positioning abstraction as a means of engaging lived experience through embodied forms of knowledge, where painting operates not as a fixed image but as an active process shaped through accumulation, resistance and transformation. The exhibition extended this enquiry into spatial and architectural conditions, with sections of the gallery walls painted blue in order to extend chromatic concerns beyond the surface of the canvas and activate the exhibition space as an immersive field of perception. This intervention draws upon historical and material associations with blue in abstraction, from Wassily Kandinsky’s writings on colour and spiritual experience within Der Blaue Reiter, through the immersive chromatic environments of post-war abstraction and the material investigations of Yves Klein, where colour operates as affective and spatial presence rather than representation. The spatial arrangement of the works further expanded painting into architectural and embodied terms, with works installed at varying heights in order to disrupt conventional viewing positions, alongside standalone walls used to echo the three-dimensional, stuffed qualities of the paintings, encouraging the viewer to physically and perceptually engage with the work. Painted surfaces were also extended into transitional areas, including the corridor between Gallery 2 and Gallery 3, where the exhibition environment itself became continuous with the work. Research undertaken during the development of Glimmers extended beyond the studio through engagement with exhibitions concerned with the continuing relevance of abstraction, including a research visit to London supported by Ulster University funding, which included the group exhibition RUNES at OHSH Projects in March 2026. This visit was prompted by an initial encounter with John Hoyland’s painting 'Don’t Explain' (1983), acrylic on canvas (244 × 228.5 cm), first experienced in his studio in November 2025 and later re-encountered within the curated context of RUNES, where the movement between studio and exhibition conditions foregrounded how abstraction shifts meaning through different spatial and institutional framings. Robinson’s particular interest in Hoyland’s practice in the 1980s, characterised by materially responsive processes such as pouring, splashing and the use of gravity and resistance, informs works that move between sensuous bodily reference and more expansive compositional forms. This engagement informed Robinson’s own material approach within Glimmers, particularly in the use of paint to produce inflated form and material physicality, alongside an expanded painting practice that extends into architectural space. RUNES situates mark-making within a broader cultural continuum, framing abstraction as a visual language that evolves across generations rather than belonging to a single historical moment, an approach that aligns with Robinson’s own interest in mark-making as gesture, record and proposition. This intergenerational framework also informs engagement with John Hoyland more broadly, emerging from an earlier exhibition in which Robinson’s work was shown alongside Hoyland’s 'Spirit of Venu's (1988) at group exhibition 'Stelltundra' at Sim Smith, London (2023) , and further developed through research visit to his London studio, while collaboration with writer and curator Sam Cornish, who is also involved with the John Hoyland Estate, situates this research within an expanded critical discourse on post-war abstraction and its contemporary relevance. See also research carried out in the paintings 'Jelly Ear', 2023 and 'Butterbur', 2023 produced as part of Stelltundra at Sim Smith, London. A further strand of the research addresses the position of women painters within post-war and contemporary abstraction, examining questions of visibility, material authorship and historical marginalisation, informed by engagement with artists such as Gabriele Münter and early twentieth-century abstraction, and further articulated through participation in CCA Derry~Londonderry Roundtable Podcast #12. Works presented within this exhibition: Gallery 1 Stone Lips (2026), oil on canvas Selfie Graveyard (2025), oil on canvas Fruitshop (2022), oil, acrylic, emulsion and collage on stuffed canvas Gallery 2 Eask Tower (2026), soft pastel on paper Pear Drop (2026), soft pastel on paper Ladybird (2026), soft pastel on paper Heart – Star – Moon (2026), soft pastel on paper Duckworth (2026), soft pastel on paper Teardrop (In an Ocean) (2026), oil and flashe on canvas Inner Ears (2024), oil and collage on stuffed canvas Thin Place (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Dry-Arch (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Starboard (2026), oil and flashe on canvas Gallery 3 Silver Lining (2026), oil on stuffed canvas Wishbone (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Moon River (2025), oil on canvas Slea Head (2026), oil on canvas This research positions Glimmers as an investigation into painting as a materially responsive, spatially expanded and historically situated practice in which abstraction operates simultaneously as embodied process, environmental condition and evolving cultural language.

AB - The solo exhibition, Glimmers, presented a new body of work at CCA Derry~Londonderry (28 March – 6 June 2026). The exhibition extended Yasmine Robinson's ongoing practice-led research into abstraction as an embodied and responsive process, exploring materiality, form and the phenomenological potential of painting. Through colour, surface and gesture, the works examine how perception, memory and lived experience might be materially articulated through the language of paint. The research investigates how emotional and sensory experiences that resist straightforward verbal articulation might be communicated through the material language of paint, positioning abstraction as a means of engaging lived experience through embodied forms of knowledge, where painting operates not as a fixed image but as an active process shaped through accumulation, resistance and transformation. The exhibition extended this enquiry into spatial and architectural conditions, with sections of the gallery walls painted blue in order to extend chromatic concerns beyond the surface of the canvas and activate the exhibition space as an immersive field of perception. This intervention draws upon historical and material associations with blue in abstraction, from Wassily Kandinsky’s writings on colour and spiritual experience within Der Blaue Reiter, through the immersive chromatic environments of post-war abstraction and the material investigations of Yves Klein, where colour operates as affective and spatial presence rather than representation. The spatial arrangement of the works further expanded painting into architectural and embodied terms, with works installed at varying heights in order to disrupt conventional viewing positions, alongside standalone walls used to echo the three-dimensional, stuffed qualities of the paintings, encouraging the viewer to physically and perceptually engage with the work. Painted surfaces were also extended into transitional areas, including the corridor between Gallery 2 and Gallery 3, where the exhibition environment itself became continuous with the work. Research undertaken during the development of Glimmers extended beyond the studio through engagement with exhibitions concerned with the continuing relevance of abstraction, including a research visit to London supported by Ulster University funding, which included the group exhibition RUNES at OHSH Projects in March 2026. This visit was prompted by an initial encounter with John Hoyland’s painting 'Don’t Explain' (1983), acrylic on canvas (244 × 228.5 cm), first experienced in his studio in November 2025 and later re-encountered within the curated context of RUNES, where the movement between studio and exhibition conditions foregrounded how abstraction shifts meaning through different spatial and institutional framings. Robinson’s particular interest in Hoyland’s practice in the 1980s, characterised by materially responsive processes such as pouring, splashing and the use of gravity and resistance, informs works that move between sensuous bodily reference and more expansive compositional forms. This engagement informed Robinson’s own material approach within Glimmers, particularly in the use of paint to produce inflated form and material physicality, alongside an expanded painting practice that extends into architectural space. RUNES situates mark-making within a broader cultural continuum, framing abstraction as a visual language that evolves across generations rather than belonging to a single historical moment, an approach that aligns with Robinson’s own interest in mark-making as gesture, record and proposition. This intergenerational framework also informs engagement with John Hoyland more broadly, emerging from an earlier exhibition in which Robinson’s work was shown alongside Hoyland’s 'Spirit of Venu's (1988) at group exhibition 'Stelltundra' at Sim Smith, London (2023) , and further developed through research visit to his London studio, while collaboration with writer and curator Sam Cornish, who is also involved with the John Hoyland Estate, situates this research within an expanded critical discourse on post-war abstraction and its contemporary relevance. See also research carried out in the paintings 'Jelly Ear', 2023 and 'Butterbur', 2023 produced as part of Stelltundra at Sim Smith, London. A further strand of the research addresses the position of women painters within post-war and contemporary abstraction, examining questions of visibility, material authorship and historical marginalisation, informed by engagement with artists such as Gabriele Münter and early twentieth-century abstraction, and further articulated through participation in CCA Derry~Londonderry Roundtable Podcast #12. Works presented within this exhibition: Gallery 1 Stone Lips (2026), oil on canvas Selfie Graveyard (2025), oil on canvas Fruitshop (2022), oil, acrylic, emulsion and collage on stuffed canvas Gallery 2 Eask Tower (2026), soft pastel on paper Pear Drop (2026), soft pastel on paper Ladybird (2026), soft pastel on paper Heart – Star – Moon (2026), soft pastel on paper Duckworth (2026), soft pastel on paper Teardrop (In an Ocean) (2026), oil and flashe on canvas Inner Ears (2024), oil and collage on stuffed canvas Thin Place (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Dry-Arch (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Starboard (2026), oil and flashe on canvas Gallery 3 Silver Lining (2026), oil on stuffed canvas Wishbone (2026), oil and flashe on stuffed canvas Moon River (2025), oil on canvas Slea Head (2026), oil on canvas This research positions Glimmers as an investigation into painting as a materially responsive, spatially expanded and historically situated practice in which abstraction operates simultaneously as embodied process, environmental condition and evolving cultural language.

KW - Contemporary abstraction

KW - contemporary art

KW - Contemporary painting

KW - Abstraction

KW - practice based research

KW - Visual art

KW - Materiality

KW - Gesture

KW - Exhibition

KW - Woman artist

KW - Northern Ireland

KW - abstract painting

KW - Post-war abstraction

KW - Intergenerational abstraction

KW - Abstract Expressionism

KW - Art history and practice

KW - Representation in contemporary art

KW - Visibility and authorship

UR - https://www.yasminerobinsonart.com/exhibitions/project-one-f5w4d-z9nem-s3jda-eyssk-a6prr-z3w2k

UR - https://www.ccadld.org/exhibitions/glimmers

UR - https://www.ccadld.org/public-programme/schools-programme-glimmers

UR - https://www.derryjournal.com/news/people/cca-derry-hosts-glimmers-the-first-solo-exhibition-by-yasmine-robinson-6940073

M3 - Exhibition

ER -

Glimmers: Solo exhibition

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CCA Derry~Londonderry Roundtable Podcast #12: Artist discussion on abstract painting practice in Northern Ireland

Stellatundra: Sim Smith Gallery London

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