Robins is a photographic visual artist and Further Education educator based in Leicester, UK. An instinctive and obsessive image-maker, her creative practice has evolved continuously throughout her life, shaped by both lived experience and sustained inquiry. Working fluidly across traditional analogue techniques and contemporary digital processes, her approach resists fixed categorisation, instead embracing hybridity, experimentation, and slow transformation. Photography for Robins is not merely a method of documentation but a way of thinking, collecting, and understanding the world.

Much of Robins’ artistic output originates from close observation of the everyday. The overlooked, the habitual, and the quietly familiar become sites of contemplation & potential. Through sustained attention to daily life, her work reveals how the mundane is charged with meaning, memory, and emotional residue. Nostalgia frequently surfaces but not as sentimentality, as a conceptual tool, allowing memories, fragments of the past, and constructed scenarios to intertwine. These elements often provoke questions rather than answers, inviting viewers to reflect on their own personal histories and shared cultural experiences.

Central to Robins’ practice is storytelling. Her visual language is multi-layered combining narrative suggestion with aphoristic humour and subtle irony. Compositions are carefully constructed yet retain an intimacy that feels lived-in and personal. The collision of wit and vulnerability allows her work to oscillate between tenderness and critical reflection, offering moments of recognition that feel both deeply individual and universally resonant.

Still life and portraiture photography plays a significant role within her practice. Collections, artefacts, and memorabilia merge and collide, forming visual archives that speak to identity, memory, & belonging. Objects are never neutral; they carry traces of human presence, absence, and desire. Through the act of gathering and arranging, Robins creates quiet yet potent encounters between material culture and emotional narrative, where the domestic becomes symbolic and the personal becomes political.

Underlying her work is a persistent and passionate inquiry into fundamental questions: who we are, how we live, what we value, and what we choose to hold onto. Her photographs probe the complexities of existence, exploring relationships between people, objects, time, and place. In doing so, her practice connects on multiple levels from emotional, social, cultural, to philosophical, ultimately offering a reflective examination of our shared world.

It becomes increasingly clear that within Robins’ compelling creations, the mundane is never truly mundane. Instead, it is revealed as rich, fragile, humorous, and profoundly human, an ever-evolving landscape wheremeaning quietly resides, waiting to be noticed. www.clairrobins.com