Robyn’s work is both immense and intimate in scale and associated message. Whilst grounded in studio ceramics, she also explores art and craft practices of textile, sculpture, drawing, photography and poetry to deliver meaning. Robyn prioritises the use of regenerative materials of clay and up-cycled waste fabric, resource-conscious ceramic techniques and discarded objects from her sites of investigation. New materialist thinking is close to hand.
‘Clay holds everything’, says Robyn, ‘it is in the geology beneath our feet, it is in the objects of comfort and culture that humankind share. Clay holds every compressive hand mark I make’. What Robyn describes as ‘hand-sense’ or the skilled touch of a craftsperson is explicitly embraced in her surface treatment, her repetitive making and in the everyday forms recreated by her such as the amphora and the woven basket.
Inhabiting a range of making places, Robyn is informed by the felt and researched narratives connected to rural and city environments such as local mountain, rivers, trees and laneways. Robyn observes keenly whilst walking alone and walking in correspondence with her community of creative collaborators. Using 'attuned-focus’, her artworks and installations are in dialogue with materiality, process, time and affect.
Robyn was awarded her PhD in the field of contemporary craft and material research from the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne where she was received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Ceramics) with first class Honours (2010). As alumna of the University of Melbourne, Phelan completed a postgraduate degree in museum studies and curatorship and a degree in visual art education.
She has exhibited widely in Australia in museums and galleries ranging from Australian Tapestry Workshop, Mornington Regional Gallery, Craft Victoria, Manly Art Gallery, Rubicon ARI, McClelland Art Gallery, First Site and Queen Victoria Museum & Gallery.
Robyn has over 20 years of experience in education, currently lecturing in the School of Art, RMIT University specialising in ceramic practice, art history and cultures and professional artist practice. She has publishing critical writing on art and craft since 1997 and has featured in a podcast by the Australian Design Centre.
The interdependence between making, teaching, collaboration and ecological-concern is a criticality from which Robyn’s practice optimistically perceives the world as embodied and connected.
