Ro Robertson has generously produced Porth, 2024, a limited edition artwork on the occasion of Modern Thresholds: Ro Robertson, a site-responsive display of drawing and sculpture on view at Tate St Ives until December 2025.

For Porth, 2024, Robertson used the same techniques as when making the Porth works on paper which are presented as part of Interlude within the Modern Thresholds display at Tate St Ives. Sheets of transparent film were placed on the sand and marks were made following the contours of the beach, incorporating rain drops and sand into the marking process. Robertson uses automatic techniques to draw freely and unconsciously ‘en plein air’, reflecting the ‘improvisation of the sea and the chance compositions it leaves behind’. The drawings resonate with surrealist techniques of automatism and are inspired by the tidal zone of the shoreline, which is submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide – in the artist’s words ‘rewriting’ the beach twice a day. The drawings appear in flux and between body and landscape.

Porth, meaning cove or entrance in Cornish, is expanded on in this work with the act of considering Porthmeor beach as a portal and the notion of a body being fluid like a passageway and having bodies of water running through it. In this work the space of the body defined in graphite by loose observations of the rocky headlands becomes a channel in which the sea passes through and pools around.