Robert John Hodge

Robert John Hodge (b. 1992, Surrey, UK). He was trained as a painter at The Glasgow School of Art (2014), making work that referenced Renaissance art and contemporary digital culture. Moving to London in 2015, where he now lives, he started creating these works in cross-stitch due to the pixel-based, yet tactile, nature of this form of embroidery.

In Robert’s practice for the last decade, he has digitised images of Renaissance sculpture before manipulating them from screen-printing. Instead, he employs a labour intensive process to transcribe each pixel by his own hand into embroidery. The arguably superfluous and futile act of painstakingly returning the digital to the analogue creates artwork that defies traditional notions of media.

In our digital age, sources from the entirety of human history rub shoulders in a scroll of a phone – old masters; celebrity; art; TV; news, merge to create a mental palimpsest. In this work, Robert John Hodge juxtaposes these sources against symbols of the early internet, the Wingdings font, creating an undecipherable language, like hieroglyphics, conjuring at once a sense of familiarity, nostalgia, and alienation from our own ancestry. Cross-stitch, transforms the pointillism of Monet or Seurat into an 8-bit, CeeFax inspired rendition of the digital, simultaneously embracing and rejecting the way the past is consumed in a digitally-oriented society.