Robyn Neild began her artistic practice as a professional fashion illustrator, working with magazines such as Vogue and Glamour, and brands such as Givenchy and Vivienne Westwood. After twenty years in this field, she decided to explore her love of form and movement through sculpture.
She works in bronze, casting from her coastal studio, using the ‘lost wax’ technique. Robyn directly uses natural materials like fabrics, brambles, hawthorn, or tree roots. These materials are destroyed in the casting process, the bronze replacing them, retaining their texture and angles: supplanting the ephemeral with the permanent. The artist is inspired by her environment, either the marshlands of coastal Kent, or the stark beauty of Dungeness, home to abandoned hulls of fishing boats with their connotations of sanctuary and past voyage.
Robyn considers decay as a process of transformation. The hollows and recesses created by disintegration are reflected in the way she works with bronze. The original sculpture is burnt out in the casting process, the molten bronze flowing into the narrow delicate spaces, sometimes halting altogether: leaving gaps and pauses.
Robyn has shown at Royal West of England Academy Bristol, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin; Affordable Art Fairs including: Hampstead & Battersea, Royal Cambrian Academy of Arts Conwy, and Wales Contemporary 2020, where she won 1st prize for sculpture. She was also first runner up of the Highgate Contemporary Art Prize 2023. She was recently included in ‘Drawing on Style’ Cromwell Place, London, The Turner Contemporary Open, Margate, and ‘Drawing on Style’ Didier Aaron Gallery, New York.
Robyn considers decay as a process of transformation. The hollows and recesses created by disintegration are reflected in the way she works with bronze. The original sculpture is burnt out in the casting process, the molten bronze flowing into the narrow delicate spaces, sometimes halting altogether: leaving gaps and pauses.
Robyn has shown at Royal West of England Academy Bristol, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin; Affordable Art Fairs including: Hampstead & Battersea, Royal Cambrian Academy of Arts Conwy, and Wales Contemporary 2020, where she won 1st prize for sculpture. She was also first runner up of the Highgate Contemporary Art Prize 2023. She was recently included in ‘Drawing on Style’ Cromwell Place, London, The Turner Contemporary Open, Margate, and ‘Drawing on Style’ Didier Aaron Gallery, New York.
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