Robyn Fleet was born in Hastings in 1974. Having discovered her hunger for travel and cultural experiences , kept her away for 14 years based mainly in Sydney Australia and London UK. Having returned to Hawkes bay 9 years ago she graduated with a Bachelor of Art and Design from Ideaschool (Eastern Institute of Technology, Napier New Zealand) Since 2013 Fleet has exhibited in several public galleries and is currently working on establishing a contemporary art space for children’s classes and workshops, also along side developing art programmes for aged care.
Robyn works mainly in oil paints and oil sticks, she is obsessed with the materiality of paint itself and what its possibilities are. Simultaneously to life, it is the act of doing that lets you discover ‘the open ended possibilities’, it opens the imagination. A principal theme in Robyn’s work is ‘the human condition’ lately she is particularly concerned with issues surrounding racism. She tries to express both of these elements through her art and finds with the open ended possibilities and open imagination is a reflection on how we may perceive ourselves or others. Who do we think we are?
“My work is about my process of how I arrive at my images. It is the intention of my work to suggest avenues of emotion and thought, the human experience through sensations of materiality and tactility.”
Robyn works methodically yet intuitively, setting up complicated relationships, connecting them through rediscovery of events.
Robyn’s latest work is in memory of her late father, Rex Fleet. In 1955 he slipped and fell while deer-culling in the Ruahine Ranges, landing in a riverbed. He was stranded there in running water for three days, paralysed and unable to move. It took a party of 17 men to accomplish an almost impossible task in rescuing him. Mr Fleet was roped over perpendicular cliffs, lucky to come out alive. He went on to live a full, healthy life.
Rex Fleet: 1929-2017
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King