Sunderland, U.K.
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
“The Ribs Begin to Rise,” Ro Robertson’s first solo presentation in a U.K. gallery (on view through January 10, 2026), takes place in the artist’s hometown of Sunderland. This location provides an ideal context in which to explore the themes at the core of their practice—particularly, the mutability of identity in terms of the body and the environment, often mediated through allusions to landscape and water, burnished by formative personal experience. Non-objective sculptural forms, unfettered by direct narrative or representation, interweave the possibility of change with the lure of history and the struggle against social constraints.
When Robertson found the title phrase in a magazine about shipbuilding published in the 1940s, it struck a sonorous chord, its language capable of describing a vessel’s structure, a town’s geography, and the human frame. Shipbuilding still defines Sunderland, a port city in northeast England’s once lined with towering steel and iron infrastructure, though barely a trace of the industry beyond heritage markers remains today. Instead, the workforce has slowly adapted to a service-based economy, with the river rewilded for nature and tourism. Robertson grew up in the district nearest the shipyards, where the last ship was launched in 1988, when the artist was four years old.
That context initially appears to shape the work, which is set out in two galleries. The first space, featuring a single window looking out to the river, contains works on paper and two tilted and abutting floor sculptures. Holder Up I and II (both 2025), seen against the broader background of the location, kindle associations beyond the forms of their loosely trapezoidal open frames. The angled, bending planes can imply maritime speed and the stability and handling of a prow. The variegated surfaces, partly rust-colored by applications of oil paint, contribute to the sensation of movement.
Robertson works with metaphor to transact interpretation; past projects infer links to littoral meeting points of sea and stone, inspired by the artist’s current base in coastal Cornwall. Associations with place are transposed into the interplay of cut, riveted, and welded steel planes, color, and openings. Likewise, the twisting and trailing ribbons of color and line in Robertson’s works on paper, rendered in gouache, ink, and pencil, emit a pronounced aquatic quality, like passing swiftly through or over water where light interpolates fleeting shifts in tone and viscosity.
The second, darkened gallery focuses on a single installation of multiple steel formations, accompanied by a wall-size video projection of images from above and below the waterline. The sculptural centerpiece, also titled The Ribs Begin to Rise (2025), consists of nine planar steel constructions, some with painted surfaces. Context once again suggests the foreparts of vessels as if gathered in a regatta. The floor on which they sit could be sea or shipyard; from above, rope-like liens fall diagonally across the space, with lighting throwing shadows onto the walls.
While suggestive, these connections are never conclusive and remain open to change. Circling the installation at head-height, a continuous band of intertwining lines trace shallow peaks and troughs in white. Even in the semi-darkness, this element stands out; and though its meaning is not immediately obvious, it resonates like another chord being struck, sending the viewer back to reappraise the show from a different perspective. If the allusion is to water, then this graphic gesture exerts a deeper significance by taking interpretation below the surface. Its height evokes contrary sensations of submersion and flotation. “Keeping one’s head above water” comes to mind—barely surviving or coping with difficult situations. The undulating pattern also resembles the representation of oscillating wavelengths, a spectrum that is constantly changing while picking out new signals.
Uncovering Robertson’s bandwidth requires an ability not only to see, but also to empathize, and even then the work preserves an impressive, private enigma. Themes are rarely visible or underscored, nor do the forms assume a fixity of definition or dimension. Objects develop a life of their own in the imagination. Within the changing scenario implied by the peripheral band, the metal components of The Ribs Begin to Rise detach themselves from ideas about ships and surface craft. They might be fleetingly identified as waterborne lifeforms growing up to the surface and the light, to a source of growth and knowledge. The video thus assumes a modified role, as a way of uniting form and content.
Robertson, who considers binary terminology inauthentic in their life, has injected a similar fluidity of origins and imports in their sculptural language. That language has come together in the years since the artist gained attention in the 2019 Yorkshire Sculpture International, emerging through painting, film, and performance, specifically with movement and sound. Metal, however, continues to play a decisive role in a career formulated in Manchester, England’s experimental powerhouse of diversity in culture and art. The experience of working such heavy material placed Robertson at the center of repetitive, unscripted, dissonant, and randomly harmonious action. Plate steel’s resistant surface responds resonantly to pressure applied by a human arm arcing up, down, and through space in pursuit of varied emotional temperatures. Emotion is a form of truth, and its physical expression is performative, the public proof of internal feelings.
Robertson’s way with sculpture registers and builds on physical lived experience. While removing themselves physically from the visual nexus and entering a more sequestered practice, broad curves and ellipses transpose the body’s actual presence into creative lines of force and mobility. In this context, the demeanor of Holder Up I and II communicates the solidarity and choreography of labor. The term “holder-up” is familiar to families in working-class Sunderland; Robertson’s great-grandfather was a holder-up, a member of the shipyard “black squad” working with the riveter, the catcher, and the heater to drive red-hot rivets into the steel plates forming the skin-like hull of a new vessel in a rhythm absorbed into muscle memory.
As well as planes that part like permeable skins, Robertson is drawn to gaps, the overlooked in-between spaces that they, as a queer person, feel society pushes them into. As a walker and swimmer, they have integrated the sensation of their body entering shoreside crevices into their artistic vocabulary. In such interstitial spaces—temporarily land and temporarily water—Robertson has found a natural corollary for their sense of self, an identity in similar motion, once condemned as being against nature. “The Ribs Begin to Rise,” charged with ambiguity, embodies that awareness. The diverse forms and surfaces thrive beyond the viewer’s ability to name any one object sufficiently, leaving a gap in knowledge while creating an environment where resolution is creatively unknown.
