Robin Wheelaghan’s first solo show included drawings from a series of sketchbooks made over the past six years, new prints and palm-sized bronze fish and eels. Surfacing themes in these narrative works repeat and reform: the sea and the river, fish, boats, the eel, the garden, song. Loss. Healing. Personal mythologies. Faith. Transition—light to shadow. Secrets, miracles, love, the end of love. Place. The body. The broken body. Fathers, mothers. Family. The gift. Transformation. Rivers. Dogs. Robin lives in Leith and studied art in Falmouth, both places of the sea.
‘Since boyhood, I have always had reverence for the eel, its mystery, a powerful creature of mud and shadows. Eels slither into the world at dusk, on the half-light, between sun and moon. It is the space between things that I am drawn to.
The flounder appears in my work because it lives in the half world of sea and estuary, and in the world of myths: this fish sings.’
A small selection of Robin’s work will be available to buy in the shop on Sat/Sun 3/4, 10/11, 17/18 December, 10am-4om.
