Robert Andrew was born in 1965 in Perth, Australia and lives and works in Brisbane. Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people whose Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates the personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. Robert’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to Country—using technology to make visible the interconnecting spiritual, cultural, physical, and historical relationships with the land, waters, sky, and all living things. Programmable machinery is combined with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to mine historical, cultural and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture.
Robert holds a Doctorate in Visual Arts from Griffith University. Robert won the 40th Alice Prize in 2018 for his work White wash over the burn (2017). His work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and has been exhibited as part of Moving Backwards into the Future (2015) and Colony: Frontier Wars (2017) at the Ian Potter Centre at the NGV, as well as Ars Electronica (2017) in Austria. He was commissioned to make Moving from the binary for Experimenta Make Sense International Triennial of Media Art. Andrew had solo exhibitions at the IMA Belltower, Museum of Brisbane and Metro Arts, Brisbane. In 2019 Andrew’s work was included in the The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
