Robin Deacon

Big Bad Beautiful Brains (00:01)
This episode is a special that I’m doing in partnership with the Spill Festival, which is running in Ipswich between the 23rd and the 26th of October.

James (00:09)
Welcome to Big Bad Beautiful Brains. I’m James. Since I was diagnosed at the age of 45 with autism and ADHD, I’ve been on a journey not only to discover how my brain works and how to look after myself, but also about other people’s brains and how they look after theirs.

I’ll be speaking to people from all different backgrounds, all different ages, and all different experiences to understand how they think and how their big bad beautiful brains work.

James (00:38)
This episode, I’m talking to Robin Deacon an artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator whose work spans performance, film, and critical reflection. Over the years, Robin’s performances and videos have been presented around the world, across Europe, the US, and Asia, exploring themes of memory, documentation, and the blurred boundaries between life and performance.

After more than a decade teaching and leading the performance programme at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Robin returned to the UK in 2021 to become the Artistic Director of Spill Festival, one of the UK’s leading festivals of experimental performance and live art.

James (01:17)
Robin, hi. Thanks for coming in. How are you doing today?

Robin (01:16)
Hey James, nice to see you.

I’m doing alright. We’re about a week out from Spill Festival, which is the organisation that I run. I’m Artistic Director and we’ve got a really lovely four day festival in Ipswich coming up and it’s just in the final sprint to that.

James (01:40)
fantastic and we’re doing these episodes in the kind of lead up to the Spill Festival week happening and ⁓ really looking forward to seeing the program we’ve got on.

Robin (01:49)
Yeah, it’s great. mean, I know that you’re talking to some of my other, some of the artists that we’re working with. I mean, I like to think, because I mean, coming up for, I’m being about four years in the role now, and you know, I came to Ipswich kind of sight unseen. And so part of running the festival has been figuring out the town and Suffolk as a whole. And so I like to think with this programme, we’ve really, I feel like I’ve kind of landed in a place where that balance between

international artists coming in from the outside of bringing their perspectives but getting them to engage with stories and narratives about the town and the people of the town. I think we’ve hit a really good balance with that.

James (02:32)
That’s really great. That’s really great. Can’t wait to see what’s coming up in the next few days. What’s a song or sound that’s been stuck in your head recently?

Robin (02:41)
It’s interesting because when you I know you shared some of these questions with me in advance and I’m, you know, I collect music still. I’m quite an avid collector of vinyl records. But what was kind of strange was rather than thinking about music and sound in its own right, my mind immediately went to sort of sound in relation to images, I suppose. You know, again, I’m in my early 50s. I turned 52 about a week ago and so I’m conscious I’m at the age.

where I still have this relationship with material objects and material recordings of things. So that’s not only vinyl records but I still collect films and films on Blu-ray, DVD and so on. And it’s quite an obscure one but there was a film that I saw

⁓ probably in my 20s ⁓ when I lived in London. It was a film called Killer of Sheep and it was by a director called Charles Burnett and it was made in the 1970s. It’s a beautiful black and white film. I it was shot in 16 mil and it’s just this kind of this camera. The narrative is quite loose, but one of the characters works in an abattoir and you could just see his day to day struggles and the circle of friends and family that he that he

works and lives with and roles with.

But the beautiful thing about the film is the way that it uses sound and the way that it uses music. And my understanding was the film, the release was delayed for quite a few years because they couldn’t get clearance on a lot of the music that he’d used. But it was released, re-released recently, a newly restored version. And there’s this beautiful section where it’s just an image of the sheep in the abattoir, sort of just moving quickly across the screen. And there’s just this beautiful piece of classical music.

music that underpins it. Now I think it’s a Gershwin song ⁓ piece of music, I’m not 100 % sure. I think it’s Lullaby by Gershwin. But there was just something about the combination of this beautiful classical music and this image of these sheep running across the screen in this beautifully clean black and white that has really lingered and reconnected with film I hadn’t watched for many, many years. So there’s something about the interplay of the sound and the image that has since

I sat and watched it a couple of weeks ago at my lounge. I’ve just been circling back and thinking, I just want to play that bit of the film again, just to hear that music and the sound again.

James (05:16)
That’s nice and

I think there’s a it’s an incredibly good example of how powerful ⁓ the accompaniment of music with visual images can be and how much it can communicate to people or how it can the change of the music can completely change the narrative of the visuals as well.

Robin (05:37)
Oh absolutely

and just to be clear about the title of that film Killer Sheep always whenever I talk to people about it they think it’s like a horror film it’s absolutely not it’s just this really beautiful meditative almost dreamlike images of Los Angeles in the Watts area of Los Angeles in the 1970s it’s such a beautiful film.

James (05:58)
What’s something you’ve been curious about lately?

Robin (06:04)
I mean, this might actually be readable in the Spill Programme ⁓ and maybe a few other things we’ve done the last year and some of the artists who we’ve been engaging with. There’s something about the Suffolk landscape. Suffolk is a place that I’ve been thinking about a lot and it’s kind of weirdness, the strangeness of it. And there’s multiple ways of coming at this because I’m currently learning how to drive. And so I’ve always lived in cities.

and so relied on public transport. But as time has gone on, I’ve realised living where I live, you know, when you want to get out of Ipswich, I mean, you can get the train to London or Norwich quite easily, but all of those other interesting in-betweeny bits, ⁓ public transport you don’t really want to rely on. And so everyone says, you’ve got to learn how to drive. So I’ve started doing that. ⁓ And I’m really excited about what it’s going to be to explore Suffolk a little bit more. And obviously,

Obviously, I’ve seen bits of it. We’ve gone on kind of walking holidays on the Suffolk coast, my wife and I. ⁓ But there’s just something about…

being located here. And like I said at the beginning, I came to Ipswich sight unseen, I came to Suffolk sight unseen. So there’s something about discovering that landscape and being able to independently do that, which I’m really thinking about a lot. And there’s a keen anticipation with that, I think.

James (07:33)
Nice, think one of the probably less useful tourism messages for Ipswich is it’s a really easy place to leave. But ⁓ I mean that in the sense that it’s very easy to get down to London, ⁓ but you can also be in the coast in 10 minutes or you can be in middle of a forest in 10 minutes or you can be kind of out exploring the countryside very easily and very quickly from the middle of what’s a fairly kind of built up town. It’s quite easy.

to get to other places from where you start in it.

Robin (08:07)
What’s also

really kind of inspiring is how, again, the artists we’ve worked with have kind of engaged with the landscape of the place. So Mark Poslett, artist, one of our big commissions for the festival this year, walked the Suffolk coastline and I’ve seen some of the drafts of the film and sound pieces made ⁓ from that and really incredible ⁓ portrait of the landscape and evocation of its history.

And earlier in the year we did some film screenings with Emily Richardson who has done some amazing ⁓ films that really beautifully depict landscapes around Orford, around Sizewell. And so yeah, it has become a bit of an obsession. And I can trace it back to really enjoying reading W.G. Sebold and Mark Fischerd I know had written about his experience of being in this area. in a sense, maybe I had experienced it through language and literature, but then

being here it becomes something quite different.

James (09:09)
Yeah, and there’s

always been a…

very close connection between the rural elements of Suffolk and creativity. Historically, you look at Benjamin Britten, Brian Eno, ⁓ and Ralph Fiennes in terms of performance and him coming back and doing the dig as a film and reconnecting with the Suffolk accent. And ⁓ Charlie Haylock, think, who taught him, a linguistic coach to teach him how to use the Suffolk dialect ⁓ in its boldest and roundest form.

I think there’s all, and equally to Maggie Hamling and her ⁓ sculpture up in Ulbrach and what happens at Snape Moultings as well, there’s a very deep connection with creativity, expression and the environment that Suffolk brings.

Robin (09:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I definitely, I definitely sense that. And I think that that the fact of that lying within the Suffolk landscape and again, not necessarily within the city or within the town. And I think often, you know, that’s why I’ve lived. It’s why I’ve studied and often those kinds of arts movements that I have been most interested in have been like in cities like, yeah, New York artists were doing in the the seventies and eighties. All of these things really.

inspiring to me, but maybe now that I’ve been here seeing that how that different kind of rural landscape can activate things.

James (10:37)
If you had to describe your brain in three words, what would they be and why?

Robin (10:44)
Hmm. Can I reduce it to three words? What did I write? I wrote about mystery, memory and dreams. And I can kind of spin those out a bit. start with mystery. So I guess, yeah, yeah, my brain maybe is a bit of a mystery to me and perhaps.

James (10:56)
No.

Robin (11:08)
you know, that’s a kind of that can be for an artist that can be quite useful because part of the artistic process or your motivation for making art is figuring out what what you think and how you think and materializing those materializing those things. So I think, know, I’ve occasionally having sort of dabbled in the odd meditation app. I suppose the more recent sort of revelations I’ve had was, that kind of chatter that you

have it that we all have like when as soon as you start to think about okay I’m going to be mindful empty my brain in some way you become aware of how much static that you know how much noise there is ⁓ and so that that that was quite revelatory I think to me I talked a bit about I mentioned the word dreams maybe this is a little more in retrospect but I did have a period why I became fascinated in dreams and

the landscape of my dreams. It’s interesting using the word landscape when we’ve just been talking about Suffolk.

There was a period a few years ago where I became very interested in transcribing the dreams and I realised after a while of doing it that I wasn’t really interested in interpreting the dreams or thinking about what they meant particularly. I always assume that it’s just the churn of my mind just sorting things out. it’s just sort of organising its filing cabinet in some way. But I got very, very interested in what it meant to transcribe things.

If I was writing something those moments where I felt like I was perhaps Misremembering things or starting to embellish something to make it sound more interesting because I went for a period of Posting some of these things on Facebook. I do these quite I got quite good at deep remembering and detailing things So I remember someone telling me like, you know the best thing if you want to transcribe your dreams just do it as soon as you wake up and don’t move too much they

had this claim that if your body moved too much you would somehow dislodge the little fragments of memory you had. So I remember kind of posting those things and those little fragments of my memory and then I was conscious that certain elements of the dreams were kind of quite… I was starting to interpret them and think it feels quite personal and then I became a little unsure as to whether I wanted to share those things in the space of social media but you know I’ve had a few recently where

I thought, no, I should maybe get back to doing that, because that was fun.

James (13:49)
When you

were transcribing the dreams, were you able to interrogate what the cause of that experience and that dream was into a real experience? As something you experienced recently and then it was your brain processing that in a dream space and you were able to connect the two? ⁓

Robin (14:09)
Yeah, some of it

was very, very clear, very, very obvious. And I remember this, the period that I’m talking about is when I lived in the US. did live in America for 10 years before I came to live in Ipswich. And I remember at that time, I was very acutely conscious of being kind of an outsider and, you know, having to go through the US immigration process was kind of, you know, psychologically quite torturous sometimes. And I do remember the sometimes

these dreams that I would have about really kind of being in scenarios where there was some very…

of intimidating American person barking orders at me or telling me what to do or not letting me cross a border or something. And so those little anxieties about when you live in a country but you don’t properly live there. I remember that being something. And then I think there were little recurrent things, know, that people who reappear in my dreams. was a filmmaker friend of mine, Stuart Croft, who died quite a few years ago now. He will sometimes come and visit

That’s how I view it. He’ll sometimes come visit me in my dreams and we’ll chat and that’s sometimes quite an interesting one because I wasn’t, Stuart was a good friend, but I wasn’t close close to him, but he for some reason he’s someone who seems to visit me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

James (15:32)
still acts as a good sounding board. ⁓

Robin (15:37)
Oh, the other one

was just memory in general. And maybe that relates to Stuart and other things like that. Maybe taking out of the dream element. I think as I’m getting older, I think my…

teens and 20s were all about collecting things, collecting objects, collecting records, books, and all of those things that gave a sense of your identity. And then maybe again, as I get older and maybe my identity is a little clearer and I’ve managed to distinguish between those things that I collected to look cool to my friends and those things. Now, actually, I really like that music or I really like that book or I bought that record because I thought it maybe look cool. All of that stuff, I feel like I’m getting rid of and I’m holding on to these

objects that kind of map something out and Realize that yeah, I don’t really buy contemporary music or stream or download contemporary music a lot of the stuff that I listen to or watch again films again a kind of little mark points that kind of orientate me to where I am now and where I

was. And so that, you know, that those are those objects that manifest my memories, records that represent times in my life, films that really meant something to me, are kind of very much part of that as well. Yeah.

James (17:01)
What’s something you’re still figuring out?

Robin (17:17)
I’ve left things a lot, I’ve left quite a lot of things quite late in my life, like learning to drive. mean, I’m 52 years old and I suppose I’m particularly, you know, living in America for 10 years. mean, my wife was able to drive out there. wasn’t, I sometimes think back and think, that would have been a very different experience living in a land that has that kind of culture of driving and distances being so different. So yeah, I think I’m a bit of a late.

I’m sometimes quite late to things, but often that’s the case with artists. The artists tend to do things a little bit later than like normal people sometimes, you know, and I’m kind of interested. I think that can be quite useful early in your life, but sometimes maybe that does kind of catch up on you a little bit later on in your life. So driving is one of those things. yeah, explorations around.

Think about where I am with education because I live for so I work for so many years before I came to Spill. I was a professor at an art school and I’d had other jobs as kind of lecturers in other kinds of places and universities and so on. But I was always struck by the fact that, I don’t have a don’t have a PhD. But at the same time, I can kick back further back in my life that I studied art. I went to art school, but, you know, I don’t have an A level in art. And there’s a lot of things that I’m

I feel like I’m really kind of good at, but I’m not necessarily trained in or haven’t taken the traditional route in. as again, as I get older, I feel like I want to loop back to some of those to some of those things. Maybe I could maybe I should take an A level in art before I do a PhD.

James (19:01)
Why not? What’s something about everyday life that’s easy for you but hard for others? All the other way round?

Robin (19:09)
Hmm. I think it’s yeah, I mean, I think we would when we were talking a little bit about this before it’s

you know, the world’s in ⁓ a really dark place. you know, I mean, but maybe it was always that way. I sometimes don’t know, is it the world or is it me or whatever else? But sometimes it does feel peculiarly dark at the moment. ⁓ But, you know, I still sometimes feel like I have this kind of…

fundamental like optimism in some way and you know, maybe that doesn’t necessarily always chime with people because I think we’ve got every reason to feel this is all looking quite dicey at the moment.

And I think, I mean, maybe in a more immediate sense, we’re also talking a little bit about the run up to the festival and there’s this sort of real tremendous sort of excitement and energy around it. And I know that I tend not to be an anxious person. And I think it’s sort of interesting kind of like in that context where there’s a lot at stake with the festival that I think that kind of sense of calmness or

is this I don’t have, I think can be kind of like, you know, the team do such amazing work and carry so much on their shoulders, never want them to think that, hey, whatever, I’m just chill about.

James (20:39)
Robin,

come on, you need to panic more.

Robin (20:41)
Exactly. again,

you know, the panic can be good and that can be an energy that can be that can be really can be really positive. But I think it’s the same thing, you know, with me as an artist who worked a lot of performance that I realized at a certain point, like I never got nervous before performing. And sometimes, you know, that again, that was great when I was younger. But then as I’ve as I’ve got older, I’ve wondered more about what does that what does that signify? Does it mean that I don’t feel like there’s something at stake? Do I not feel that there’s

something that’s important that the nervousness gives that is an indication of, yeah, of there being something at stake. ⁓ I don’t think there’s always something at stake when I do perform or make a piece of art, but I kind of used to view that as a bit of a superpower that I wouldn’t get nervous. But maybe now I look back and I think, hmm, maybe.

that would have kept me in check a little bit or made me think a little bit more about what I was doing.

James (21:46)
Have you found any approaches that make the world work better for you?

Robin (21:51)
Maybe this relates a little bit to artistic thinking about what you do as an artist. I’ll sometimes look back to these periods, maybe in the early to mid 2000s, where I was incredibly prolific in terms of putting my work out there as a really young, ambitious artist. I look back at some of that stuff and think, wow, that was great, that was fun. Then I’ll look back at some of it and think, oh, I shouldn’t have

bothered with that or that was a bit that was a bit ropey. And so I think, you know, that a certain kind of slowing down and I used to really crank out performances, you know, I do 20, 20 odd more, 20, 30 performances a year. And sometimes there were things I remember. I remember this after one of my performances where someone came up to me and said that, oh, you it looks like you rehearsed that for minutes. And I thought that that was

It was very funny at the time, maybe the significance of it as a kind of slightly backhanded compliment was funny to me. But I think there was maybe a certain point, around the late 2000s, I did have these longer gestation periods on things and my creative process became a lot more stretched out. And I felt like, if I’m not cranking stuff out every five minutes, it doesn’t mean that I disappeared as an artist. It just means I’m working on something that needs a little longer.

and a couple of projects that kind of unfolded over a number of years rather than a number of minutes or hours. That definitely felt like that worked better. And again, I think about this in terms of aging, that I look at videos of myself performing in the 1990s, in the late 90s or early 2000s, and just even the physical capacity to do some of the stuff that I was doing. The work I started was very physical.

went on, I did become more interested in writing and film and maybe a more cerebral approach to it. yeah, think that’s slowing down a bit and thinking less in terms of I’ve always got to be doing. ⁓ Sometimes the doing can be happening kind of in the background when you’re not consciously doing it and then a solution to a creative problem can appear.

James (24:16)
Yeah, and I think, I don’t know you agree with this, I think there’s particularly with the age of social media and the feeling of the urge to produce content all the time and put it out in the world can kind of take you down the wrong path a little bit. And sometimes it is having that ability to pause and create something more considered.

Robin (24:41)
Yeah, and again, and I don’t want to feel like I’m you know, I’m just grouchy old middle-aged man Because I think you know social I do find there’s elements of social media I do find really super interesting and the different speed at which people work and obviously, I you know the experiences I have working in education and That I still have ⁓ You the students that I engage with you just see yeah these differing ways of seeing the world and again different conceptions of

time, differing conceptions of that relationship with being online. And I think there was this commonality that maybe we all have, anyone who uses social media, that you’ve got this push and pull between this desire to be seen, but also a kind ⁓ of desire for privacy as well. And I watched, I was really interested in watching some of my students kind of grapple with that, about a fear of being overexposed or, you know,

not getting too many, like posting something and it not getting likes and then relative to something blowing up, something going viral and that can go to quite a dark place. And weirdly what I was saying about dreams and posting these dreams and realizing that I was also felt like some of those transcriptions of dreams were quite revealing sometimes and then feeling like, I’ve really laid something out.

and it would like four likes and I’d be like, you know, that’s kind of good because there was a sense of, yeah, I value that privacy. But there was also a part of me that was like, I really shared something with you there and only four of you. So that push and pull, think that’s that cost to me that possibly crosses generations.

James (26:32)
And I guess that of hyper accelerates the artist’s experience of perhaps putting out pieces of work ⁓ on a lower frequency and having the same experience of I really threw myself into that and all I got was… Beats on a kind of super fast speed. And that’s fine. But you have to kind of want to be in that space or not feel like you’re forcing yourself into that space.

Robin (26:45)
this. ⁓

Totally, totally. But you know, it’s a structure that we kind of, yeah, decant our everyday thoughts, little creative things that we’ve done or, you know, whatever it is. And I don’t know, I think, you know, more and more people are maybe starting to question it, you know, like the attention economy and it, you know, to what degree this is about keeping people’s eyeballs on stuff so you can be told more stuff or that question of destruction.

interaction. We’re all grappling with it.

James (27:31)
And the political

narrative that comes with it as well is that kind of, know, everything’s fighting for attention and some things are louder than others and bad news travels faster than good.

Robin (27:40)
Oh

yeah, and an economic model for those things that are sort of built around keeping people distracted and angry.

James (27:47)
Yes, keep them looking at something else while keeping busy, keep their minds moving on something else. ⁓ Going on to more positive things. ⁓ What’s a small thing that always makes you smile?

Robin (28:01)
Probably my dog was the first thing that came to my mind. I grew up with pets, but generally in my family we’d have pets that lived in cages. We’d have know, gerbils. I had a rabbit when I was a student. And then when we first moved to the US, my wife, we were, you know, she’d always wanted a dog. And I didn’t really have a point of reference with that because I’d never had a dog.

And at a certain point it was like, yeah, okay, let’s do it. And we went around and went to some rescue centers and eventually found Frankie. And that moment where we went to meet quite a few dogs, like bad online dating, you’d meet people and say, I don’t think so. And then it was that moment where Frankie comes into the room and it’s like, yeah, that’s the one, we both agreed, he’s the one, let’s take him home. And so he was there for the whole decade. ⁓

in the US and he made it back for the first year we were here, but then he was ill and passed away. So he was a funny one. You know, again, had a difficult upbringing, which I think still resonated throughout his life. But I think I used to have this, the image I had of dogs were this kind of unruly thing. And it was initially, and there were moments I went, what have I done? What have we done bringing this dervish into our lives?

And then as we kind of figured each other out, you just sort of became a real…

piece of our lives and I think that presence that he bought was really really ⁓ valuable I think and then obviously we you know had a bit of downtime and now we have another lovely little ⁓ another little dog, Peppa. She is a weird spaniel terrier mix and again very different personality but there’s there is something about I don’t know what it is about dogs I think a lot of a lot of the people

A lot of my ⁓ colleagues at Spill ⁓ tend to be cat people and so often just the anecdotes we come to the office about about the cats and the dogs are very very different and but there’s something about ⁓ yeah I couldn’t imagine having a cat because they just go out and just do their own thing and I’d worry I just worry about them whereas at least the dog I know where my dog is and I know he’s always pleased to

see me when I come home and you know she’s always pleased to see me when I come home.

James (30:40)
Yeah, I think I grew up around cats and ⁓ the, it’s very different relationship. I’ve got two dogs now. ⁓ Our first dog passed away ⁓ in 2019 and we were kind of, know, absolutely crestfallen about it and resolved that, you know, let’s have some time without a dog and see how we go on. And then four weeks later we’d found a puppy because it was just having that companionship

⁓ of a dog is just, you can’t compare it and cats just don’t do the same thing. Cats have an expectation. ⁓ I think dogs come with no expectation and it really shows and now we’ve got ⁓ another dog a few years ago so we’ve got two absolutely chaotic dogs, both very different characters. But do you bring so much to the family unit? I think it is very important to have that.

around the house and you notice it when it’s not there anymore.

Robin (31:40)
Yeah,

I remember being ⁓ that period between dogs of, kind how quiet the house was and not in that kind of realization. wasn’t, know, Frankie wasn’t necessarily a loud dog all the time, but that just conscious of that sense of it was so palpable of there being this strange absence. And I mean, we took a little longer. I mean, it was nice to be able to sort of go on holiday.

and not worry about either having to take the dog with you or the dog being boarded and the expense of that or just missing him. So we did manage to get a bit of traveling done in the interim that was really great. But yeah, that was quite a pivotal moment, I think, in terms of an experience of…

you know the grief we experienced I think really highlighted the joy that it did bring you know having having the animal so yeah

James (32:46)
If you had a free day with no plans, how would you spend it?

Robin (32:49)
Well, maybe it would be something enjoying with the dog, you know, and with my wife. mean, just thinking of differing modes of transport, you know, I think maybe again, because of the not driving yet, a lot of our holidays are walking. And so that has often been a nice way of sort of, again, kind of starting to find that connection with the Suffolk landscape, but knowing that when we can drive, that will kind of maybe expand outwards a bit. And, you know, you’re not reliant on.

or trains or buses that come once every three hours or whatever. One of the things that we were talking about, ⁓ my wife and I were talking about recently was ⁓

Well, we’ve discovered the ferry that goes from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. And a few months ago, we took that and it was, we took the night ferry and got a cabin and it was really great. And it was just such a strange experience in some ways of how, how close you were to Europe. And then, ⁓

there was something about then we discovered you can take dogs on the ferries we should we should do this with the dog next time and we’ve been talking more recently about sleeper trains as well that idea traveling at night traveling in a cabin and like the idea of you know a free day with no plans day becomes night and you know just that thing of being transported through the night and sleeping going to sleep in one place and waking up in another place and it’s another day there’s something about that process

and having the bed, everything in this sort of small little space for conversation, for watching the world go by. There’s definitely something about that that I think we both really like.

James (34:40)
Yeah, I was fortunate enough when I was 15 or 16 to take a train to Poland. Yeah. And just kind of watching the world go by and, your tiny little cabin stays the same, but everything around you is changing and just kind of making the journey part of the experience rather than trying to get the journey out of the way as quickly as possible and get to the destination.

Robin (35:01)
And

you don’t get that in the same way with, mean, yeah, plane travel, you know, I kind of, it’s a bit love hate really. It is, you know, I’m sitting in a seat and people are bringing me food and drinks and stuff. That’s quite nice. But then at a certain point, you know, there’s nothing really to see other than, mean, the clouds going by can be quite nice. But yeah, in a similar way, traveling through Europe on trains and the experience we had traveling in the US on trains sometimes we took a

from San Francisco to Chicago and just seeing the changing of the landscape and actually seeing that and experience those changes even changes certainly in the American trip the distances we were traveling these sort of changes in weather patterns you’d see the kind of balmy west coast and then you know you’d be on the train for that was nearly three days and then by the end of it you were back in the snowy Midwest and it was it was it was just really fascinating seeing that really

that sense of time and distance really being writ large in a way that on a plane it all gets a bit compressed and you lose those visual markers.

James (36:13)
What’s something that always makes you lose track of time?

Robin (36:21)
I was, yeah, this question was an interesting one because I was trying to think about when I really lost track of time in a really profound way. And I think it’s maybe it’s been a while. Maybe it’s maybe it has been a while. ⁓ I remember I’ve had a couple of experiences over the years on ⁓ doing artist residencies where I think.

I mean, Spill also has a residency program we do and I feel really kind of passionately about it because I feel like I’ve experienced as an artist how that kind of withdrawal or that removal from sort of everyday life can really cause these great leaps in what you’re doing. yeah, a couple of examples of where I remember

There was a really lovely residency I did when we lived in America at a place called McDowell, which is in New Hampshire.

It was quite a long form residency. think I was there for about six weeks and you were basically given a cabin and there was a main building you’d go to and they’d serve you breakfast. And I think they’d stop serving breakfast about 7 a.m. or something. So you’d have to get there early to start the day. And then you go back to this little studio that was dotted around the grounds and you just have a day to yourself in these beautiful grounds with kind of deer occasionally walking by someone come in a little truck.

at some point and bring you your lunch and then the evening if you wanted to you could go and sit and have dinner with all of the other artists who are on this residency and I do remember the experience of doing that for six weeks where it felt like everything kind of slowed down and all of those things that usually are kind of clattering around in your head just started calming down a bit and then I’d sit at my desk and then realise an afternoon had passed

and that was really wonderful and I you know you know I remember there was one particular instant where I looked up and it was dark out and I had and it was a genuine shock that I’d been so consumed in what I was doing it I hadn’t even noticed that but that’s so rare that those experiences and I’ve been again I’ve been blessed in my life even to even though I never experienced anything like that again if I never do another residence

see in my life, that was such a profound sort of experience to have had.

James (39:03)
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Robin (39:09)
⁓ It’s hard to, yeah, this was a really difficult one. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I remember, it’s a bit of a cliche sometimes. Like I said, I worked in education for quite a few years and…

often people will say, oh, I learned so much from my students. And sometimes I hear this said, like I roll my eyes a bit and it’s like, yeah, of course. It’s a bit of a cliche, but the example I’m going to give does come from a conversation I acutely remember having with a student where we were talking. It was a student I knew when I taught in Chicago, where I taught when I lived in the US. He was a writing student.

I just remember him talking about… ⁓

You know, we talk quite a lot about what you need to make art or to be creative. And like I was really conscious that certainly at that time, a lot of the art I was doing was really fiddly. You I had, you know, I think I was doing a lot of stuff with old analog video decks and doing all of these things with unreal with technology that was a bit old and unreliable and would break down. And you’d be lugging this stuff around, you know, to get to the next show.

It’d be so much to be Karen. I really felt like I just had this weight on my back. And I just remember talking to this student and it wasn’t so much advice that he gave me, but we were talking about how we worked and he just said something about writing and he just, like all he needs is a room ⁓ and a thing to write on and that’s it. And that’s all he needs. And I just remember the way he articulated it resonated with me so strongly at that time.

like maybe a few more years later, I’ve kind of maybe got more to that point where, you know, the thing I’m most interested in doing is writing and I’m conscious of how, what kind of minimal utensils you kind of need for that. But I remember back at that time, I was like, that is really, that would be nice. Just not having to think about all of this stuff that made up my work as an artist. So I just remember hearing that from this student who,

just he just seemed to be talking from such a kind of liberated place and I remember that felt like although he wasn’t dressing it up as advice I think I read it as such I took it I took it that way because I think you know

James (41:48)
Yeah. Now sometimes where the best advice can come from is that it’s not necessarily dressed up as advice. You can perhaps interpret it. Yeah.

Robin (41:54)
It was

inspiring, was definitely inspiring and again just coming from this person and again there are those interesting moments as much as I was saying, it’s a cliche when people say it, it is an example of one of those moments where the student tutor relationship kind of flips and I’m like oh actually that I’m listening to you now and what you’re telling me because that…

learned something from that and god knows where that student is now, George, George Olken, I don’t know what he’s up to but yeah just if you’re listening George thank you.

James (42:27)
Hopefully he isn’t

surrounded himself by technology. He’s still writing it all down. I think that that’s one of the things I’ve come to realise is that I spent a long time trying to figure out how I best worked and I’d always try and find…

a piece of technology that would be the thing that would help me or I’d surround myself in kind of tech to do things for me. But then I suddenly realized the easiest thing for me to do to keep track of what I need to do is just to write it on a piece of paper. And I just need a pen and paper and I’d write my list down and it’s a real thing. And I don’t need notifications and reminders and technology to do the most basic of things, which is just kind of keeping myself on track.

Robin (43:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

James (43:13)
What’s something you’re excited to learn or try in the future?

Robin (43:16)
Well, you know, one hand I was going to say I’d refer you back to driving.

I I used the term liberation before in terms of what that student was telling me, someone talking from this sort of liberated sort of position and I don’t know to what degree there’s some kind of liberation could come through that ability to move of your own, ⁓ a little more of your own volition rather than being subject to train timetables or whatever else but you know, still love train travel. ⁓

there’s definitely something about what that what I’m hoping that wall that will open up for me but knowing that all of that’s starting to change and maybe part of me is wanting to do that before everything goes driverless and like you know if the the technology if that if that is where we’re headed then that idea of yeah being behind the wheel may be a kind of vague memory I think that people used to do and now we rely on

technology to do it. mean, I don’t know, I don’t know how many years, I know how many years I’ve got left or what the speed of that technology is. But yeah, it’s become a bit of an obsession, I think. And do know what? It just reminded me, talking about this thing about transportation, I remember one of the first things I did when I left university was I applied to work on the London Underground as a guard, as a train guard. And I got

interviewed but I remember that they had they didn’t have this sense and I didn’t think they really understood why someone with a first-class honors degree in fine art wanted to to do this ⁓ to work to work within that context of public transportation but ⁓ it just yeah it just flitted into my mind there because I know the the route from being a train guard you then become a train driver that would be the next step and there were periods in my life not as a little child to them

ambition where I kind of really like the idea of that in a strange way like just yeah driving a train that being your job ⁓

James (45:29)
After you’ve done your

A level, then that’s maybe something you can kind of work towards after that. What’s one thing you’d like listeners to take away from this conversation?

Robin (45:35)
Yeah, yeah.

I mean, if we’re framing it in relation to the Spill Festival and what my role is, I think…

I think it’s nice for me to be able to talk from the perspective of someone who organises the festival, advocates for other artists, but still, you know…

manages to sort of I can still I think I can still meaningfully call myself an artist and Like I you know, I’m it’s it’s hard sometimes I think what you know, it was the same when I worked more in education that you were always you had your teaching over there and then your studio time over here and sometimes Those things could be a little bit those things could be a little bit in conflict But I think it’s I think it’s important to sort of yeah understand that all of those things that I’m talking about

in terms of creative process and my own experiences of that, I think it…

that it’s important that those things feed into what I do with Spill and with my job because I think it’s important for arts organisations to understand artists and what their motivations are. As screwy as those motivations can sometimes be, I think it’s important that there is that understanding that there’s…

Logistical stuff, there’s administrative stuff that within the sector that we’re all having to grapple with, but then there’s also this kind of slightly messy stuff that you can’t quite articulate or stuff that’s a bit outside of language or meaning that we still have to find a way to engage with. And I think I’m kind of lucky that because I’ve been a bit on I’ve been on both sides of the fence that ⁓ I still pride myself on still being able to see

see both sides of those experiences.

James (47:40)
And

final question, so this ⁓ episode’s coming out during festival week, ⁓ what’s next for you?

Robin (47:47)
So in the short term, I’ve got ⁓ a meeting where we’re signing off on some posters for the for the festival, some marketing, some marketing stuff at the festival launch. I’m doing a short performance piece ⁓ and I have to find some quite unusual props and objects for that.

and I’m trying to remember actually when we last did the festival in 2023 whether it was one of those things that was over within the blink of an eye or whether you were really kind of in the thick of it and I have memories of kind of both states of mind sometimes so I’m kind of excited about what that’s gonna

what that’s gonna feel like. I’m so excited about it because again I’m so proud of the programme and I think it just speaks to something that I think I’ve been trying to get to. then that’s the sort of maybe medium term. I mean this is all short term I guess. And then once the festival’s done I’m gonna go to Orford for a nice walking holiday with my wife and the dog.

And I think again maybe that loops us all the way back around to those explorations of the Suffolk landscape that some spill artists have been doing, but also that I’m really interested in doing as someone who lives and works here now.

James (49:07)
Thanks Robin.

Robin (49:08)
Thank you.