Freddie Robins is Tutor for Mixed Media in the Department of Textiles working alongside Lesley Sealey. She is personal tutor to the second year MA Mixed Media students and currently supervisor to one research student.
On graduation from the RCA in 1989 she established Tait & Style, a design company specialising in embroidered, knitted and needlepunched fabrics, with fellow RCA graduate, Ingrid Tait, working for eight years, designing fashion and furnishing accessory collections and marketing them worldwide. Changing her practice in 1997, she has concentrated on producing conceptually led knitted textile pieces. In 1998 she received a Crafts Council Setting Up Award and in 1999 received a London Arts Award to produce a large-scale knitted work. She has recently received an AHRC (Arts and 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.
Her studio practise questions conformity and notions of normality, and intersects the categorisation of art and craft. She uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition. She finds knitting to be a powerful medium for self-expression and communication because of the cultural preconceptions surrounding it. Her work subverts these preconceptions and disrupts the notion of the medium being passive and benign.
She has built up an extensive and innovative body of figurative works and has exhibited extensively within the UK and abroad. Her work is held in both private and public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Crafts Council. She is represented in London by Contemporary Applied Arts.
Click here for Freddie Robins website