Exalted Humans

Christian Info News, January 1992

This sculpture - Speak - is one of several which has been displayed at Regent College's Lookout Gallery during December and January. Interest in the show (which ends January 29) has been considerable. Ann Rosenberg of the Vancouver Sun featured it and Robinson has been taken on by the Diane Farris Gallery, considered one of Canada's best. Robinson attends St John's (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church in Vancouver.

"Our society understands power in terms of wealth, prestige, influence - any status by which we may appear to be exalted above the rest. I have never been inspired to make images which would delineate or enhance this paradigm of power. Instead, I have attempted to portray these figures at a point of tension between resignation and rage; the place where we find ourselves as our ideals of attaining this sense of personal power and balance are shown to he the very source of a stifled potential of the human spirit."

"...The figure is bound to a lectern; a structure built to uphold those called to speak. This binding is the true relationship between artist and his or her medium as the artist creates a life's body of work, be it lectures, poems, sermons or statues."

"...It was at the place where Christ was lifted up in a posture of humiliation and absolute weakness that his absolute power was realized, and he was able to speak those words that are unattainable to man as 'artist'. "It is finished." The artists of the human race will search all their days for the right to proclaim those words but they are not within the vocabulary of human potential. History's masterpiece was formed at the intersection of those 'infinite timbers,' where Christ the carpenter had his body spliced to a wooden cross..."

- David Robinson