Toyah Robinson’s practice focuses on the inherent interconnectedness shared between our lived experiences and space/place. Whether it is always taking notice of a particular sticker that is stuck around the city, seeing the same graffiti artist pop up everywhere, witnessing pieces of mess and chaos that feel intimately familiar or having a moment of feeling connected to a stranger because of your shared experiences.
She captures these ephemeral elements of the every day and presents them in a meticulously curated moment that is presented in a permanent format – painting. It refines, intensifies and reifies these experiences that are already available to us in day-to-day life into a tangible solid object that coaxes the viewer to reflect on their own lived experiences that are tied to the ones presented in front of them.
The visual information in these pieces are manipulated to create a final product that is a warped oxymoron, where despite the realistic style of painting, things don’t seem quite right – objects being too large or too small, or angles and perspectives not exactly lining up. All these things mimic the overlap of memory when recalling experiences mentally.
