Joanne Robertson. Scorpion dance music

Robertson flows like a river. She wears her heart on her sleeve and paints and sings directly from it. She is a natural. I would like to be more like her.” Martin Creed

Joanne Roberston is an intermedia artist of the highest order. Born amidst the teeming psychic rubble of Blackpool, she eventually fled the hippie strewn dunes for the Glasgow School of Art, where she divided her time between painting, music and writing. Following odysseys throughout the international noise rock underground, she opted to take her MFA at UCL Slade School of Fine Art. This is where she formed the Blood ‘N Feather Collective with Lucy Stein. Their visual and performance art was widely feted and was included in the prestigious Becks Futures 2006 show. She began showing widely after this, and also performing and recording as a solo musician. An album entitled The Lighter, produced by David Cunningham was released by the Textile label in early 2008. Later that year, a new intermedia collective, Bad Bat, was created by Robertson, with Alex Kronacker, Rebecca Fitzmaurice and Rachal Bradley. Bad Bat mounted a show at the URA Gallery in Istanbul which was reviewed in the November 2008 Artforum.Throughout this time, Joanne has continued music and writing. A book of poetry, Apesma, was released by Bad Taste Books in 2007, and new albums are due soon. Visually, Robertson’s work has taken a hermetic turn in the last year. Previously, her work was a divination of external surroundings and elements. She would dive into surface confusions and sort through them, arranging their patterns into pyramidal glitter stacks. Now, her paintings and three dimensional pieces are mostly related to her and her own body. They take the intimacy of internal mystery and refashion it as a tattoo on the skin of reality. From life, of life, with life. There ya go

text Byron Coley

Joanne Robertson
Scorpion dance music