Tim Robinson
Tim Robinson’s work has become an international touchstone for scholars, writers and artists interested in, and concerned with, the changing nature of the Irish Landscape. In particular, the production of the maps of the Aran Islands, Connemara and the Burren, along with his books on the west of Ireland, have established him as the foremost writer, cartographer and thinker of the Irish landscape over the last 40 years.
Robinson was born in Yorkshire in 1935 and studied mathematics at Cambridge University. After a career as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London, he settled in the Aran Islands with his partner Máiréad in 1972 and began a detailed study of the landscape of the West of Ireland through the lens of cartography and writing.
The Folding Landscapes mapping project was Ireland’s winning entry for the Ford European Conservation awards in 1987. He was elected to Aosdána in 1996 and to the Royal Irish Academy in 2011. He was the Parnell Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, Cambridge in 2011, and the following year was a visiting artist at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. His paintings and constructions have been exhibited as part of joint and solo exhibitions at Camden Art Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Hugh Lane Gallery among others.
Robinson has published extensively in Ireland and internationally in literary magazines and journals such as Field Day Review, Dublin Review, Irish Pages, The Irish Review, New Hibernia Review, and Best American Essays. He has won two Irish Book Awards for his writing on Ireland, and has undertaken a translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille with Liam Mac Con Iomaire which will be published with Yale University Press in 2015. His books include Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Labyrinth, the Connemara trilogy, the imaginative fiction of Tales and Imaginings, and the essay collections, My Time in Space and Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara & Other Writings.
View published books in library catalogue
View a short visual interpretation of Tim Robinson's Connemara trilogy