Freddie Robins is an artist who challenges the common perception of knitting as craft. Her work is internationally renowned; her practice crosses the boundaries of art, design and craft.
‘The centrepiece of Freddie Robins's new show comes as something of a shock. A floor-based installation of knitted life-size bodies – displayed as an interlocking circle – it brilliantly transforms the craft of knitting into conceptual art.’ Liz Hoggard, Review of The Perfect, Contemporary Applied Arts, London.
‘She knits blood-soaked gloves and murderers’ houses, and collects everything from fake limbs to Shrek memorabilia. She knits in concepts – at the same time humorous and familiar, yet also sinister and disconcerting.’ Tamsin Blanchard, The Observer. Click here for full article.
Freddie Robins has been a tutor in Textiles at the RCA since 2001. She studied constructed textiles at Middlesex Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1989. On graduation she established Tait & Style, a design company specialising in embroidered, knitted and needle-punched fabrics, with fellow RCA graduate Ingrid Tait, designing fashion and furnishing fabrics and accessories for eight years. Exhibiting at trade fairs in London, Paris and Tokyo, the collections were sold to major stores worldwide, including Conran Shop, Liberty and Harvey Nichols in London, and Barneys and Takashimaya in the USA and Japan. They also designed and produced pieces for other designers including Paul Smith, Marithé and François Girbaud, Commes des Garçons, John Galliano, John Rocha, Dior, Givenchy and Kenzo.
Changing the focus of her practice in 1997, Freddie has concentrated on producing conceptually led knitted textile pieces. In 1998 she received a Crafts Council Setting Up Award and also received a Public Art Commission from the London Borough of Hackney for Shoreditch Library, London. In 1999 she was commissioned by inIVA to create a multimedia work for their experimental web space X-Space, and in 2001 she a received a London Arts Award to produce a large-scale knitted work. In 2002 she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize: Textiles. In the same year she had her first solo show, Cosy, originated by firstsite at the Minories Art Gallery, Colchester, and touring to the Pier Art Centre, Orkney.
In 2003 Robins represented the UK at a Triangle Arts Workshop, Britto International Artists’ Workshop, in Bangladesh, receiving funding from the British Council. In 2004 she undertook a residency at Galerie sphn, Berlin. Later that year she was invited to co-curate Knit 2 Together – Concepts in Knitting for the Crafts Council. She also instigated and curated Ceremony at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, London. Ceremony explored the role of craft in the paraphernalia and rituals associated with the rites of passage. The exhibition culminated in the Knitted Wedding of Freddie and artist Ben Coode-Adams, organised by knitting collective Cast Off.
In 2006 she received an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) Small Grant for the Creative and Performing Arts to enable her to further develop her work through the use of computerised, automated knitting machinery and ‘seamless’ knitting technology. The resulting pieces formed part of her solo exhibition Body, Nobody, Somebody at Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Bergen, Norway. They were also shown at her solo exhibition, The Perfect, at Contemporary Applied Arts, London.
She has been a member of the Crafts Council Development Award Selection Committee and a curatorial adviser to Axis, for their curated online programme, ‘Open Frequency’. In 2010 she was a selector for the Jerwood Contemporary Makers with Hans Stofer and Richard Slee.
Since 2009 Freddie and husband artist Ben Coode-Adams have been converting a Grade II listed, sixteenth-century, timber-framed barn into a live/work space. The project appeared in Grand Designs on Channel 4 in autumn 2011.