Exhibitions

Recent Past Exhibitions

155A Gallery

155A Lordship Lane (off Bawdale Road) East Dulwich London SE22 8HX

'HAPPENSTANCE' An exhibition in association with London Craft week 12-18 May 2025

Exhibition at 155A Gallery continues until Sunday 25th May, Thur - Sun 12 - 5pm

'Happenstance' is a curated exhibition of Robert Cooper's imaginings through collage, timepieces that speak of the tides , of the making of London, its shipping, trade guild, and crafts, of fashion and taste, of waste, value, and material histories.

Robert continually assembles and reassembles, drawing attention to the potency of fragments, their being-there-ness as well as their perpetual incompleteness. There is a fluency that comes from an acute knowledge of materials and their histories as well as a fascination with the wider contemporary visual environment.

Making through restless invention – reflected in his kaleidoscope assemblages - the works are eclectic, jaunty, suggestive. While some come together quickly, others can take years, yet Robert offers all of these fragments the potential to be made whole again.

Resulting sculptures are disorientating and potent. Thick green glass. Bottlenecks. Clay detritus from the workbench. Broken figurines. Soft-paste porcelain. Jug handles. Trinkets. Pipe stems. Bin ends of glaze. Discontinued ceramic transfers. Moorish tiles. There is, at the same time, the perfect synchrony to this rabble of things, often discovered while mudlarking on the Thames forshore. These pieces are a judicious combination of past and present – not streamline or rational, but rather off-key. It is the discord between these elements, these histories-in-pieces, that sings.

Contemporary Applied Arts

6 Paddington St., London WIU 5QG

Robert Cooper is an established ceramicist who has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. He is fascinated by the persistence of artefacts and ideas. He often uses found objects, such as pottery shards from the Thames foreshore, which are imbued with a previous life and function, as a starting point for his work.

He has, for many years, employed recycling as a mode of working. Different elements such as clays, oxides and glazes left over from teaching sessions, discontinued ceramic transfers, printed imagery from popular culture and even pieces of previous work are recombined to create new narratives with multiple meanings.

Gallery Kasper, Japan

'Holding to the Light'
13 - 28 April 2024

Design Centre, Chelsea harbour,
Lots Rd., London SW10 OXE

9 - 13 October 2023

Contemporary Applied Arts.

Robert Cooper ceramic pieces will be showing as part of first exhibition celebrating 75 years of CAA.

4 - 22 april 2023

Fen Ditton gallery

23 High Street
Fen Ditton CB5 8ST

Art and Environment: An Autumn Season

22 October – 13 November brings the River Cam into view through the charcoal drawings of Kate Boucher, and pastels by David Emond; also on show will be other river focussed works which include: photographs by Graham Murrell; ink drawings by Roger Law; ceramics by Robert Cooper and prints by Kittie Jones.