Artist Q&A
Katya Robin
"Drawing helps me participate in the world when illness might otherwise limit that participation. I don't see drawing as a retreat from life but as a way of engaging with it".
How would you describe your making process?
People make marks. It's an instinct. Cave paintings, graffiti, doodles, notes in the margin, names scratched into benches. Drawing is my MO. I draw everyday life: domestic life, healthcare settings, social spaces and civic systems. It's my way of making sense of the world, remembering, understanding and connecting.
Drawing is an ancient form of communication, a social action rather than simply an object. It still feels urgent and relevant. By drawing, I don't just mean pencil on paper. I use whatever helps me make and share marks: graphite, ink, pens, paint, printmaking, collage, publishing and digital tools. The medium changes. The impulse remains the same.
I'm drawn to overlooked moments and ordinary objects: reception areas, waiting rooms, sanitiser bottles, parking bays. Some work is drawn directly from observation. Other pieces are assembled from memory, experience and imagination.
How do you use your energy and time to produce work alongside your illness?
Pacing is pretty much the only way of managing the pain and exhaustion of ME/CFS. It's an illness that steals energy and stamina, and often one's sense of self, because it becomes so difficult to participate fully in everyday life.
I work in short spurts interspersed with long rests. This has become a way of working with repetition and iteration: the same thing again and again, the passing of time, here we go again.
My series Parking Bay and Skip Surveillance are iterative views of the street from the bedroom I used as a studio. They were made at all times of day and night, rather like the photographer in Hitchcock's Rear Window, watching, in the centre of the neighbourhood but still isolated. I often draw in bed. It's not just Henri Matisse who does this.
How would you describe your relationship to the wider world?
Drawing helps me participate in the world when illness might otherwise limit that participation. I don't see drawing as a retreat from life but as a way of engaging with it.
I am drawn to the overlooked and ordinary, the frayed edges and fragments that reveal the contradictions of contemporary life. Certain motifs return again and again because they carry an unexpected emotional weight. I have frequent medical appointments and often sketch while waiting. It helps me feel less lost within the bureaucratic machinery of healthcare. I'm not just a date of birth or a patient number. I draw from within the experience, as an embedded participant rather than a detached observer.
I also often sketch from a position of being hidden in plain sight. When confronted with inaccessible places, I wait in the car and whip out my sketchbook. Thanks to the advantages of the Blue Badge, I often have a central viewpoint while remaining effectively invisible.
So, is your work autobiographical?
Not really. My work comes from lived experience, but it isn't diary work. I draw from where I am and what I encounter, carrying my own memories and psychology with me, yet I'm interested in more than my own story.
I use personal experience as a way of exploring wider questions about contemporary life: how people navigate institutions, manage uncertainty and find meaning in ordinary places and objects.
My experiences become a way of thinking about the anxieties, hopes and habits of the times in which we live.
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