Cartographies en mouvement: Re-imagining the Tim Robinson Archive

In September 2014 the Tim Robinson Archive was formally launched with a preview exhibition, international symposium, and public interview with Tim Robinson, at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Robinson is acknowledged as being the most significant writer and cartographer of the Irish landscape over the last forty years, and his work has been published to much critical acclaim and translated to a wider global audience in recent years. As a mathematician trained in Cambridge, Robinson is a self taught visual artist that lived and worked throughout Europe (primarily in London) in the 1960s and early 1970s where his visual and environmental artworks were exhibited in galleries and non-traditional settings. His international reputation now lies with his extraordinary work detailing the landscape of the west of Ireland, primarily through maps and books he has written focusing on the complex histories and geographies associated with the places and people of this part of western Europe. This paper explores the archive of Tim Robinson through an artist-in-the-archive research project, Iarsma: Fragments from an Archive, based on the maps and writings of Tim Robinson.