Sian Robertson
“Why art and my creative practice? Well, in a nutshell, because I can’t not do it - it’s as essential to my being as eating or sleeping.
I grew up in Wales, in the UK, but have lived in the US for nearly 30 years. My creative practice really began in the world of craft and evolved over the years until I seemed to find my home in paper cutting and collage. I now work almost entirely with used maps and atlases, cutting away specific areas to focus on and enhance others, creating 3D work from a 2D representation of a 3D world. I only work with used ones as they come with an inherent history that I rarely know anything of; it’s interesting to me that there are thousands of copies of a specific map printed in a given year, and most will end up in the recycling bin; but one of them somehow ends up with me and I turn it into a piece of art. Mostly I’m drawn to the colors and the shapes of maps - and occasionally, though rarely, the geographical location. I like to say that a beautiful map makes my heart race and my hand reach for an X-acto knife.
This year I have been focused on a specific daily art practice where I create a very small 3D piece, that includes some cartographic element - one piece every day of 2020. It has been a great way to expand my creativity, and to experiment on a small scale with new ideas. It’s also managed to keep me busy and artistically challenged during the lockdown that we’ve all been facing.
I’m not exactly sure how I first heard about Fountain Street but I think it was when I saw a few pieces by Chelsea Revelle at the Fuller Craft Museum, maybe four years ago, and I looked her up. And since then the gallery name kept coming up as I researched artists I liked on social media, or met at an exhibit, or saw in some show somewhere. And it just felt like a lot of artists that I was really drawn to were connected to the gallery - and I wanted to be one of them.”