STUDIO JOURNAL | May Issue 2026
The Studio’s Letter
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We have returned to the studio in Sydney. The light falls the same way it always has, across our table, across the floor, across the still canvases where so many ideas first began. After time spent away, there is something grounding about being back. One moment has shaped this entire month and everything we have been doing. Seeing our first sculpture, Waar blomme dryf, “Where petals drift”, placed within its new home in South Africa. No longer just sketches or fragments in the studio, but complete. Suspended in its space, the petals holding their gentle movement in the air. After the installation was finished, we stood beneath it, simply taking it in for a while. Looking up at the petals suspended above, a thought surfaced between us. "Some ideas refuse to stay on canvas." It landed with unexpected weight. We have not been able to shake that sentence. It kept returning as we left the space. It followed us back to the studio. It lingered in the silence between sketches and experiments. And then again, the question appeared one Thursday evening. What if the petals left the canvas? The thought kept ringing in our minds. What if the work could move beyond the frame and live among us, present within the spaces we move through each day? What if art could inhabit the senses. What if beauty could be felt in passing moments. What if the spaces we live in carried the presence of a garden in bloom. Lately, the studio has been filled with these ideas. Sketches scattered across the table. Fragments of materials. Late nights and early mornings fuelled by cups of coffee. Something is unfolding. The Garden Collection is beginning to grow in new ways, slowly extending beyond the canvas. Forms that may live within rooms and homes the way petals exist within a garden, soft and atmospheric, shaping the feeling of a space. We are following the thought wherever it leads. Letting it take its time. Because some things reveal themselves slowly. For now, we remain here in the studio, allowing the work to become what it wants to be. But we can feel it.
With love, The Robertsons
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STILL BECOMING
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There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives when something is in its earliest stages, when an idea is still too delicate to speak about directly. We have learned to respect that quiet, to work inside it rather than rush past it. We have been thinking a great deal about the senses. Not only sight, which is where most art begins and ends, but the ones that reach you before you have made a decision to be reached. There is a moment in a garden, and anyone who has spent real time in one will know exactly what we mean, where something changes. It is not the visual. You could close your eyes and still know precisely where you are. The garden announces itself through other means. Something in the air. Something your body recognises before your mind catches up. That moment is now our focus. Separately, and we will say very little here, we have been in deep conversation with makers. People who work with materials formed under extraordinary pressure and time. There is something that has always moved us about the idea that the most enduring beautiful things in the world are not delicate. They only appear that way. We are exploring what it means to make something that sits at the intersection of the studio’s artistic language and a form that travels with the person who acquires it. Both of these directions are early. Neither is ready to be named. But they are real, and they are being built with the same care and refusal to compromise that has guided everything the studio has produced. We do not move fast here. We never have. But we do move forward... |
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Although the Peony Garden Collection continues to expand, the canvas will always be the soil from which it first grew. This upcoming commission returns to the first moment Kurt Robertson placed paint upon a blank canvas: the first seed of the garden. Within the work lives a sense of nostalgia, but also a deeper curiosity, as though the viewer has stepped into a garden whose secrets are only just beginning to reveal themselves. Petals seem to emerge from memory as much as from paint, revealing fragments of colour, depth, and movement that feel both familiar and unknowable. In this way, the painting becomes less about what is seen and more about what is slowly being revealed. In many ways, the piece feels like standing at the entrance once more. It serves as a reminder of where the garden first took root, and a glimpse of the unseen forces that continue to guide its unfolding.
Revealing in August 2026.
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