Peter Robinson’s current work with cascades, swags and trailing garlands of differently scaled polystyrene chains, scatterings of chain link off-cuts, and granular clumps of raw polystyrene map Promethean dreams of bondage, ruin and colossal endeavour onto scenarios of fractal self-similarity and post-industrial digital replication. An archaic material animism meets intricately vertiginous ramifications of self-organising systems in a blizzard of friable whiteness. Robinson’s multiplied links of chain operate somewhat like bricks in a building system: while bricks bear organic, earthy associations, but count as invariable units in patterns of repeating abstraction, so Robinson’s links shed mythic associations of great strength and constrained force as they read as delicate modular units proliferating massively or minutely. One grand narrative nudges another aside as a dynamic of power gives way to a sublime of innumerability and a network of countless connections. As diagrams of infinite connectivity, Robinson’s aggregated chains model a parodic universal theory of everything. In this totalising, yet disconcertingly weightless vision, the timescale of the commercial cutting of the polystyrene by electric wire, and that of the protracted manual assembly of the links, pair by pair, are but two possible threads within Robinson’s rhizomatic delirium of hyperbolic syntax, which is capable of linking molecular patterns to chemical processes, to biological structures, to social systems and military chains of command.

Allan Smith, October 2007