Motto and Robertson present new works that posit formal abstraction as a counterpoint to the pace of contemporary visual culture – encouraging viewers to take the time to look (at their own looking).
Sculptor Emily Motto and painter John Robertson present new works that oscillate between flat and spatial encounters. The exhibition posits formal abstraction as a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary visual culture – encouraging viewers to slow down and take the time to look (at their own looking).
In fly fishing ‘Emergers’ are types of artificial fly that imitate a fly transforming from a nymph to an adult dun at the water’s surface. Neither wholly of water nor air, at this point in their lifecycle the creatures are between two worlds. The artificial flies of course never fully ’emerge’, rather they remain perpetually at the interface, forever at the point of their own becoming.
Emergers, 2nd – 19th October 2025 A.P.T Gallery
Private View: Thursday 2nd October 6PM – 8PM
Events– New Views through Abstraction
Together with Myatt Garden Primary in Lewisham, Deptford Green School in Deptford & and Archbishop Tenison’s CofE High School in Croydon, Motto & Robertson have been creating new ‘Looking-Devices’ to be used in the public viewing of these new abstract works. The devices are available for the public to use throughout the duration of the exhibition (during Gallery opening hours) and details of the project are displayed in the exhibition.
About the Artists
Emily Motto – Sculptor, b.1992 Orpington UK has been creating playful and unstable forms, arenas and mazes, often delegating elements of the making process to properties of the materials she makes and chooses. Her work has been playing with what can happen when shapes and lines are extended into palpable forms in space, with dependencies on weight, material reactions, and physical limits; and she enjoys how forms can share in a bodily sense of space. She loves to find formal relationships and material qualities that emerge with character, poise, and human feeling.
Her work embodies practicalities of dealing with material and stuff in an ever-filling environment, particularly amongst a world of increasing virtual encounters. Works play between visual and physical balances. Sculptural environments host painterly harmonies. She is excited to create spaces that slip between different modes of attention and focus – particularly through the tactility and dependencies of the materials she uses, and the varying viewpoints from which parts can be pieced together.
Motto’s work has been exhibited internationally, and received awards including the Red Mansion Art Prize, The Royal Society of Sculptors’ Gilbert Bayes Award, and the Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship at the British School at Rome. Her work was featured in the Saatchi New Sensations, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and exhibited in ‘What is the Future of Art’ for the Tate Modern’s reopening. Solo
exhibitions include ‘Footnotes’ at The Royal Standard, Liverpool; ‘Intervals’ at New Local Space, Jamaica; and ‘Postures’ at Rice+Toye, London. Motto often works collaboratively with young people to develop new works, and has worked on commissions for Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Turner Contemporary, Clyde&Co London, and The Ashmolean Museum, amongst others. Her work was recently shortlisted for the Royal Society of Sculptors’ First Plinth Award 2025
John Robertson – Painter, b.1983 St Asaph, UK Robertson’s current work can be seen as an extended meditation on the formation of pictorial space. The work plunders painting’s history and, perhaps surprisingly given its apparent similarity to late Modernist abstraction, consistently returns to two fifteenth century Annunciation paintings as its primary source – Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in cell three of the San Marco Monastery in Florence and the upper panel of Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of St Anthony. These two form the basis of two interlinked subjects of enquiry: The relationship between the painting and the wall in the case of the Fra Angelico, and the active role of the eye in the formation and reformation of space in the case of the Piero della Francesca (the Virgin appears to be in front of or behind a pillar she is next to depending on whether you look at her head or her feet). Recently he has been working on shaped canvases as a further elucidation of the relationship between painting and wall. The forms of these canvases morph as part of the process of each painting’s production – adding new panels, un-stretching the canvas to cut parts off, rebuilding the stretcher and re-stretching the canvas in a lengthy process of becoming that literally includes the wall as an element in its compositional arrangement.
Robertson (b.1983, UK) graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2012 and was the Abbey Scholar in painting at The British School at Rome from October 2017-June 2018. Recent shows include San Marco at Haricot Gallery, London, 2024; Annunciations, Sandy Smith Studio, New York, 2023; Ex Roma V, A.P.T Gallery London, 2021; All or Nothing, Lungley Gallery, 2019; The Garden, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019; the December, March and June Mostras , British School at Rome 2018 and 2017; Pasticcio and Mesclun, Climax of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 2016; Studio Leigh, London, 2015; e e e e o ee e i a a e e a, Rhubaba, Edinburgh, 2015 and Tilt, Royal Academy Schools, London, 2014.
