Urgencies (2023): Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Derry~Londonderry

URGENCIES (2023) is the third instalment of a biennial group exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Derry~Londonderry, presented 21 January–18 March 2023. Selected through an open call, the exhibition surveyed contemporary artistic responses to urgency across social, material and political conditions in current practice.

Robinson’s contribution comprised four works: Green-Cheeked Parakeet (2022), The Pits (2022), Love Bugs (2022) and Sunset Lover (2022). The works developed from practice-led research into histories of textile labour in Derry, specifically referencing the Tillie and Henderson shirt factory and the experience of women workers, including the artist’s grandmother. This context informs an engagement with industrial labour as both material and social structure, and its relation to contemporary conditions of production.

The work considers the decline of local textile manufacturing in the mid-twentieth century and its connection to the outsourcing of production within globalised economies. Rather than presenting this as a linear historical account, the research uses these conditions as a framework through which to examine the relationship between labour, material culture and contemporary forms of consumption.

Central to the work is the notion of the “social fabric”, understood as both textile material and a conceptual structure through which collective histories are held and transmitted. Through the incorporation of reused textile materials within a painterly and sculptural framework, the work explores how material processes can register labour, memory and place.