The Golden Bough: Tim Robinson: The Decision

Tim Robinson is both a writer and artist based in Roundstone, County Galway. He left London in 1972, for the Aran Islands where he began to research and make maps of the islands and later of the Burren and Connemara. These maps comprise drawing and collage and are informed by the historic/folkloric associations of the topography as well as the geographical positioning. Hand drawn, the attenuated marks recall his experiences of walking this terrain and acknowledge the human imprint on the landscape as he encountered it.

As well as the maps, this exhibition, The Decision includes some earlier artworks that in retrospect Robinson recognises as prefiguring this renowned mapping project.

In these early works reflecting upon the many tenuous and indefinite forces that converge to produce our fates, Tim Robinson creates an iridescent installation out of the threads of his life’s journey. Robinson suggests that, even by moving from city to island, from centre to periphery, from the visual to the written, one cannot transcend one’s habitual and limited creative means – a fact that calls in question the very concept of ‘decision’.

Profile

Tim Robinson studied mathematics at Cambridge and taught the subject for three years in Istanbul. He then began a career as an artist with an exhibition at the Galerie Fuchs, Vienna, and later showed at Signals Gallery and the Lisson Gallery in London. His writings include a two-volume study, Stones of Aran, and a trilogy on Connemara of which the final volume, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, has just been published by Penguin Ireland. He is a member of Aosdána and the RIA, has an honorary degree from NUI, and is currently the Parnell Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge.