Lines of Containment by Jenny Robinson

Jenny Robinson was brought up in the Far East and was educated in England. A life-long traveller, she has lived and worked between London, San Francisco and Europe for the past 2 decades, and now lives in Sydney Australia.

Robinson’s work is concerned with the peculiar transience of our man-made environment, and is specifically preoccupied with the conceptuization of ideas around fragility and strength, and in exploring the juxtapositions between the impermanence of what is ostensibly permanent.

Robinson’s practice emerges from the observation and study of the architectural fossils of the places she has lived. Through firsthand observation, she creates human-sized, two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional spaces that frame, and inform, the contemporary urban experience.
Increasingly inventive in her methods and her consideration of materials, her large-scale dry points are printed on lightweight Japanese paper, a material choice that points out the ironic contrast between the inevitable destruction of the welded metal building and the museum-conserved future of its likeness, pressed into semi-transparent tissue.
These images are a carefully-constructed first-person record of a temporary place at a fleeting moment in time – an artist’s multi-layered lightfast impression of impermanence.

Jenny Robinson often depicts the entire timeline of a structure in one image, and by extension, that of the people who built it, used it and will take it apart – our past, present and potential.