← Performance

STANDALONE PERFORMANCE

Flowerhead, 2024

TYPE
Durational performance for camera, colour and sound
DURATION
30 min 44 sec
LOCATION
Artist’s studio, Worcester, UK
YEAR
2024
Full performance video. Courtesy the artist. Watch on Vimeo ↗

As a closeted queer teenager, Robinson wandered fields around Worcester, picking flowers and smoking cigarettes, angry and frustrated by a life he could not yet live openly. In this durational performance he reinhabits that adolescent self through a deliberately obstructed exercise with his mother, using flowers picked from his family’s garden. He must translate his mother’s instructions into action himself, threading flowers one by one into a wire armature worn over his head until his face disappears. With his sight restricted by the mesh, she may direct the placement of each flower but cannot touch the arrangement. Their shared frustration becomes the performance’s structure. The resulting painting carries the act into a floral self-portrait in which concealment becomes a way of appearing.

VIDEO STILLS

Still — Robinson wearing the bare wire armature over his head, before the flowers are threaded in.
Video still
Still — the armature filled with flowers, Robinson’s face fully concealed.
Video still

Video stills courtesy of the artist.

RELATED PAINTINGS

A Longing for the Longing: painting of a head entirely covered in muted flowers above a dark track jacket. A Longing for the Longing (Thou Shalt Cover Thy Face), 2026
Oil on canvas, 150 × 120 cm

Pro Corpore Florem, 2024
square allotment flower head tinted, 2024
Small allotment flower head centred and tinted, 2025
Small allotment flower head head down to right side, 2025
Allotment Head — Still from movie, 2025