Paul O Robinson is a visual artist, architect, educator. He was born into a family of concert and circus musicians and taxidermists and raised on the Atlantic coast of Northeast Florida, USA. He attended university in music theory and composition; served a 5-year apprenticeship in the atelier of a master industrial patter-maker; began studio Paul O Robinson; received a master’s degree in architecture summa cum laude and is a Fulbright Fellow in art and architecture. His primary studio is located in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where X-rays, paintings and castings are developed to create intertwined correspondences between themselves and the spaces that hold them. He continues to have exhibitions and installations in Europe and the USA; teaches design and theory at the Fakulteta za arhitekturo, Univerza v Ljubljani; is the editor of AR/Architecture Research Journal; is visiting professor at l’università di Venezia Iuav.
His current work concerns the spatial consequences of human transience and abandonment. The work explores the latency of transience within marginalized sectors of urban environments and the reconstructed spaces holding the artifactual history of occupation. Using forensic X-ray technology as a generative tool, the palimpsestic traces found within these sites are transformed into two- and three-dimensional artworks while reforming the environments within which they are installed. The work attempts to ‘capture’ the liminal resonance of transience as matter for reforming and concretizing spatial narratives through the intersection of architectural and artistic processes and confronts the ethical boundaries defined by the consequences of violation, displacement, voyeurism and the tenuous lines between deeply private and public realms.