Robyn Litchfield

Robyn Litchfield was born in New Zealand and currently lives in North London. Her paintings are representations of sublime encounters with places; pristine and untouched. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Litchfield aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. She is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity. 

Most of her sources are photographs - predominantly personal archival images of early New Zealand and, more recently, contemporary photographs of primeval landscape, which she has predominantly taken herself. She applies transparent paint in expressive brushstrokes and works back into it using various implements and processes such as scraping, layering and erasure to reveal the luminous ground below. The paint mimics the emulsion on the glass plates of early photographs whose images were revealed by light shining through them. She thinks of the ground like a screen where images are projected and perceived. 

Stencil use was developed as a means to subvert other images, reproduce forms and create a visual vibration. By cropping and editing early postcard images of forest, the aim is to reveal the ‘punctum’ of the image. The dark red forms placed within these paintings derive from remnants of stencils developed for these earlier works. For Litchfield, they are symbols of loss, of past life, of primeval forest and the biodiversity that it supported, and represent a lament for this loss. Their intrusion into the picture plane is a metaphor for a kind of otherness similar to that felt by immigrants today.

EXHIBITIONS

'Between the Bars', The Terrace Gallery, London (2022)

'Between the bliss and me', TIN MAN ART, London (2021)

'Landscape's Unstilled Life', Darl-e and the Bear, Woodstock, Oxfordshire (2021)

'On the Strangest Sea', The Violet Hour (2020) 

'Women’s Lockdown Art', Zabludowicz Collection, London (2020)

Summer Exhibition, The Royal Academy, London (2020)

Nunnery Gallery at The London Art Fair, London (2020) 

Winter Exhibition, Darl-e and the Bear, Woodstock, Oxfordshire (2019-20)

'Collyer Bristow Exceptional Award', Collyer Bristow Gallery, London  (2019-20)

'Salon 11', The Old Lockup Gallery, Cromford, Derbyshire (2019)

'The Bow Open 2019', The Nunnery Gallery, London (2019)

'The Immaculate Dream', Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2019)

'British Painting II', Bermondsey Project Space, London (2019)

Oxfordshire Art Week Festival, Darl-e and the Bear, Woodstock, Oxfordshire (2019)

Signature Art Prize exhibition, Trinity Art Gallery, London (2019)

Signature Art Prize Gala, Bankside Hotel, London (2019) 

'Exceptional', Collyer Bristow Gallery Award, London (2018)

M.A. & Other Postgraduates Contemporary Art Exhibition, Atkinson Gallery, Somerset (2018)

'Clifford Chance's annual Postgraduate Printmaking', London (2017)

Affordable Art Fair Graduate Show, London (2017)

'Multi-story', Wilkes St Weaver, London (2017)'Future Histories', Project Space Wapping, London, (2017)

'Elles in Rogue: XX Protagonists', Artworks Elephant, London (2016)

'The Windows are Illuminated', Embassy Tea Gallery, London (2015)

'We Shall Not Cease from Exploration...', CoffeeWorks Project, London (2014)

'Mark Wallinger Presents: Best of Bow Arts 2014', Bermondsey Project, London (2014)

'House on Fire', Embassy Tea Gallery, London (2014)

'Oh The Places You'll Go, The People You'll Meet', Resource For London, London (2014)

'Off The Ground', Resource for London, London (2013)

'Libero', One Paget Street, London (2013)

'The Other Exhibition', Yu Gallery, Treforest, Mid Glamorgan, Wales (2013)

'Cass Degree Show', London Metropolitan University, London (2012)

'Avant Premier', Arbeit Gallery, London (2012)

'Work In Progress: The Aldgate Project', London Metropolitan University, London (2012)

'Choice', Unit 2 Gallery, London (2011)

'Exhibitionism', Tru Trading Gallery, London (2010)

AWARDS

Jackson’s Painting Prize Landscape/Cityscape/Seascape category (2020)

Collyer Bristow Exceptional Award (2019)

Collyer Bristow Exceptional Award, highly commended and the Staff Prize (2018) 

EDUCATION

2015-2017 City and Guilds of London Art School, MA Fine Art (Distinction)

2008-2012 The School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, BA Fine Art 2006-2008 City Literary Institute, London, Fine Art Course

1977-1980 Massey University Wellington, New Zealand, Fashion Design