Professor Freddie Robins
Freddie is an artist who challenges the perception of knitting as a benign, undervalued domestic activity. Internationally renowned, her practice crosses the boundaries of art, design and craft.
Freddie is Professor of Textiles, teaching across the programme, AcrossRCA, and supervising postgraduate research students. She has been working at the RCA since 2001 and is the College’s public orator. Freddie is a graduate from the Textiles programme, having previously studied Constructed Textiles at Middlesex Polytechnic.
Freddie is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) holding a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education. She is a member of the RCA Material Engagements Research Cluster (MERC) and of the Peter Dormer Lecture Committee.
Freddie is an exhibiting artist producing objects and sculptures through the use of textile materials and processes. She is renowned for her inventive and provocative use of knitting. In 2025 she is the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Program, Reed College & Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon, USA.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
More information
Research interests
The core of Freddie’s research is the exploration of the potential of knitting as a serious medium for self-expression within the territories of fine and applied art. She challenges the preconceptions that surround the medium, demonstrating the conceptual and structural possibilities that knitting offers beyond the expected outcomes of fashion and textile design. This exploration encompasses the fullest breadth of processes and techniques from traditional hand-knitting to the use of the latest automated, computerised machinery. Research outputs include objects, sculptures, installations, exhibition curation, conference presentations and written papers for academic journals, books and magazines.
Research themes: the power of the 'soft stuff’, championing the use of soft materials and textile practices, challenging the hierarchy of materials and process, contemporary feminism, issues of the maternal, uses of digital knitting technology.
Research keywords: Textiles, Knitting, Art, Craft, Wool, Gender, Feminism, Motherhood, Humour, Subversion, Softness, Digital Knitting Technology.
Practice
Freddie Robins’ studio practice questions conformity and notions of normality, and intersects the categorisations of art, design and craft. She uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition, more recently exploring the power of the 'soft stuff’, challenging the hierarchy of materials and creative disciplines.
Freddie 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.
Freddie has built up an extensive and innovative body of textile works and has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad, most notably in If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960–2022, The Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London; History in the Making: stories of materials and makers, 2000 BC – Now, Compton Verney, Warwickshire; Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting, Museum of Arts & Design, New York, and The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
Freddie's work is held in both private and public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Government Art Collection, London; Crafts Council, London; Castle Museum, Nottingham; Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum; KODE – kunstmuseene i Bergen, Norway and Szombathely Art Gallery, Hungary.
Research funding
2013 Grants for the Arts award, Arts Council England/National Lottery to support the creation and exhibition of a new body of work, Out on a Limb, in the Project Space at COLLECT at the Saatchi Gallery, London.
Awards
a-n Artists Bursaries: Time Space Money, 2021.
Shortlisted for Women to Watch, at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, USA, 2012.
Current and recent projects
As a member of the RCA Material Engagements Research Cluster (MERC), Freddie has exhibited at their two public-facing exhibitions. These exhibitions bring together practice-based and material-led academics from the RCA, highlighting the world-leading research taking place under the umbrella of the research cluster:
.. proliferating materialities… (2023), Gallery Season (SZN), London
Colour made manifest (2024), Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London.
In Colour Made Manifest, the overarching focus questions, and offers to illuminate, the paradoxical realm of colour, through research activities exploring how the immaterial notion of colour can be explored and evidenced through a number of materialising projects. It also builds from staff discussions embedded within the MA and PhD group teaching this year prompted by Neil Parkinson and the RCA’s Colour Library Collection.
For a full catalogue of other research outputs see the RCA Research Repository.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Exhibitions / Commissions
Freddie has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Recent exhibitions include History in the Making: stories of materials and makers, 2000 BC – Now, Compton Verney, Warwickshire; If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022, The Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London; I Put a Spell on You – New Magic and Mysticism, Art Exchange, University of Essex; MEDUSA, Union Gallery, London and The Amber Room: Sticking up for Soft, Cedric Bardawil, London.
For full solo and group exhibition details, please see the artist’s website.
Recent Conference Presentations
2022
Keynote, UAL Awarding Body: Teach Inspire Create 2021/22.
Shemakes Gender Visions Workshop, Centre for Circular Design, UAL.
2018
Co-organiser (with Fiona Curran) of Feminisms & Materialisms Symposium, Royal College of Art.
In the Loop @ 10, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
2017
Keynote, The Matter of Material symposium, Turner Contemporary, Margate.
2016
Keynote, Damage and Repair symposium, Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts.
2015
Making Futures 4, Digital Crafting Network
Panel, International Research
Conference, Plymouth College of Art.
Motherhood and creative practice: Maternal structures in creative work, London South Bank University.
Dis-Identifications: Gender Matters in Practice symposium, ICA, London organised by CREATE/feminisms, a research cluster in the School of Design, Middlesex University.
Recent Publications
Robins, F. (2022) ‘Stab It, Strangle It: Media Representations of Knitters, and Subversions of the Stereotype to Reflect Inclusion and Diversity’, Textile: Cloth & Culture.
Robins, F. and Coode-Adams, B. (2018) ‘Resistant Materials’, Sluice, Inter/nationalism, Autumn/Winter.
Robins, F. (2018) ‘Do Not Touch’, Surface Design Journal, Volume 42 Number 3.
Robins, F. Day, L and Gluckman, E. (2018) ‘Unpicking the narrative: difficult women, difficult work’ in TEXTILE: The Journal of Cloth and Culture Volume 16 Issue 3, 311-319.
Robins, F. (2017) ‘Bad Mother’ in Bad Mothers: Representations, Regulations and Resistance, Ontario, Canada: Demeter Press.
Robins, F. (2016) ‘Bad Mother/Mad Mother’.Studies in the Maternal MAMSIE Journal Volume 8 Issue 2, 1-9.
Robins, F. (2015) ‘The Perfectly Imperfect’. Making Futures Journal Volume 4.
External collaborations
Since 1990, Freddie Robins has acted as a Visiting Tutor, and given lectures, at many of the UK’s leading universities, museums and art galleries including: Goldsmiths’ College (University of London),
Buckinghamshire New University, Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), Central St. Martins and Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (University of the Arts, London), De Montfort University, Glasgow School of Art, Norwich University of the Arts, Belfast School of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA, Norwich, Firstsite Gallery, Colchester and Camden Art Centre, London. She has acted as an External Examiner at Buckinghamshire New University, Bath Spa University, University of Hertfordshire, NCAD, Dublin, and been a PhD examiner at UAL. She has taught projects and delivered lectures at institutions outside of the UK: Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Norway), Konstfack (Stockholm, Sweden), Vilnius Academy of the Arts (Lithuania) and the School of Design and Craft (HDK) at the University of Gothenburg Steneby (Sweden).
Freddie has a long-standing relationship with the Crafts Council, from 2002–6 she was a member of the Development Award Selection Committee. She has spoken at many of their Seminars and Forums (1999–2013), acted as a Mentor on the Hothouse scheme (2012–13) and was invited to curate their exhibition K2tog: Concepts in Knitting (2005). She was one of the selectors for Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, the inaugural exhibition at the Crafts Council new gallery in Islington (2021).
Freddie has been the Makers representative on the steering group for AA2A – artist’s access to art schools scheme (2000–1) and a Curatorial Advisor to Axis (the online resource for UK contemporary art) for their curated online programme, Open Frequency (2006–7). She has been a member of selection panels for the Jerwood Foundation, Cockpit Arts, Arts Foundation and The Vlieseline Fine Art Textiles Award.
Freddie has curated exhibitions for the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London (Ceremony, 2005) and The Art Station, Saxmundham, Suffolk (Thread Count, 2024).
Freddie is a member of the Peter Dormer Lecture Committee.
