Robin Gammons is a painter and large-scale ceramic sculptor from Butte, Montana. She is currently living in New York and pursuing an MFA at New York University. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2019.
When I was a kid I had a fixation with jumping off of things. On the playground at school I would climb on top of this purple plastic dinosaur, and standing on top of its head, I would close my eyes tight and leap off. I did this over and over again in search of the brief moment where my body defeated gravity before falling onto the soft cushion of wood chips. For a split second, my body did exactly what it wanted to - even gravity could not stop it.
I don’t think my interests have changed much since then. I still feel the need to fly. As I’ve grown I have found other ways of doing this, too. Through painting I’ve been able to conjure wind in my hair, or feel the warmth of the sun where it isn’t shining. Still, the sensation is brief. In my studio I set myself up for a moment of soaring, repeating it over and over, even though I know that nature will win out every time and I will fall back to earth. But the stuff of my life is that fraction of a moment of flight in the fall. My purpose is to be in the sky, and my destiny is to fall to the ground.
When I paint, I access a type of abstraction that requires both spiritual and scientific thinking. I think of abstraction as a place where science, spirituality, philosophy, and art meet. When we reach our imagination just beyond the bandwidth of the brain, our physical intuition- or spirit- or body- becomes more alive, lifting us up beyond ourselves. In those moments we have no choice but to lean on the unknown, because what we can easily understand will pull us back down to earth. I see people around me accessing this abstraction in so many ways. My catholic friend knows that the holy spirit is present with her every day. My farmer sister intuits that the crops will only flourish if she gives thanks and respect to the land. My geologist parents can see the earth’s changes over billions of years, shrinking themselves into infinitesimal specks, their existence ever approaching zero but never touching it.
There is an inherent vulnerability in abstraction- it requires the willingness to trust a type of knowing that has tenuous connections to our understood world. When I’m making my work, I access my vulnerability to meet others in this abstract place. I attempt over and over to get closer to something I will never reach- I don’t believe it is possible to know what I am trying to know.