"By travelling, I found my most profound way into history – inspired by travel, my art is a vehicle by which to he a dialogue with history. The layers of time, memory, history, paintings, absence and longing are woven metaphorically into every layer of the paintings; they become the texture and patina of history." [Robyn Burgess. MFA thesis statement 2003]
Burgess’s work seeks to reveal the relationship between the traveler and home, near and far, the past and present, of the monumental and the personal. Robyn questions why the foreigner views the city with a freshness and sense of urgency. Her imagery annotates her travels to foreign cities, the construction then deconstruction of architectural forms in her works providing metaphors for the human condition. Robyn’s works study and reflect the traveler thrown into cultural uncertainty and potential powerlessness. The foreign city’s structure, location and architecture begin to reflect one’s interior reality. Robyn observes;
"it is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves.."
Her works blur and disrupt reality of their origins, in this absence there is an unfolding of memory and history. In the paintings there is the ‘intention’ to oscillate between the classicism of the form and its disintegration. The distinction between close and distant vision, is significant when making the work. When viewed from a distance the forms are apparent whereas at close range the forms disintegrate and the surface speaks another, more gestural, impasto, abstract
language.
Burgess maintains the relevance of the ‘mark’ as separate to the visual image. Each journey overseas was in the heart of winter in the cities of New York, Italy and Russia. The weather becomes a subtle and invasive factor in her work. Some of the paintings are
"shrouded in a rhapsodic blur" [Robert Nelson, The Age 2002], that enhance the monumental elements of her subject matter. The surfaces of her works are raw, disrupted and tormented with visible thick layers – yet the observer – sees a magic, mysterious and haunting image. The powdery, ephemeral layered surfaces symbolize the transience of life.
In summary, thematically Robyn’s work captures "our desire for the near, the closely seen, the concrete….and can be assuaged only by the reminder of the greater reality of the far, the vague, the dimly seen, the
transient."
Burgess lectures at La Trobe University, Bendigo, and is represented in numerous public and private collections through out Australia and overseas, including Artbank, Bendigo Art gallery, Concorde Mining, Denver USA, Deakin University, National Trust, UENO University, Japan, and The Victorian College of the Arts.
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