In the week before the opening of Ro Robertson and Jill McKnight’s exhibitions at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA), an enormous cargo ship named Van Jaguar arrived at Sunderland Port. Docked across the Wear, in view of the National Glass Centre (NGC), the ship dwarfed the gallery and was an almost-too-perfect coincidence at the preview for ‘The Ribs Begin to Rise’ by Robertson and ‘Past and Future Pact’ by McKnight. Both artists work primarily in sculpture, and while they use very different materials and processes, when we met, they both spoke of being influenced by the materiality of the working-class culture they were raised in, which has been deepened by the specific research that went into these two bodies of work. 

In the ground-floor gallery of the NGCA, Robertson’s ‘The Ribs Begin to Rise’ comprises new steel, board and rope sculptures reminiscent of rusted and discarded industrial off-cuts, alongside exuberant, watery works on paper and in film that continue the artist’s inquiry into the queerness of in-between spaces. Whereas upstairs in McKnight’s installation, a distinct palette of bright ‘red lead’ and royal blue washes across the bulbous and rough-hewn surface of a chickenwire and plaster bandage monument to women factory workers, as well as exquisite etchings and prints on faux-pyrex dishes. 

Roberston explained that, ‘I think [our history as working class people] has real sculptural importance in terms of our understanding of structure and scale’, with the Van Jaguar looming in the background through the museum’s glass frontage, as if to emphasise the point. Both of the two Sunderland-born artists grapple with the representation and commodification of working-class identity in contemporary art, and this acknowledgement of their own knotty relationships with their heritage and the wider art world adds an important layer of criticality to their work. 

For these exhibitions, both artists have conducted research into industrial histories, led by their familial heritage and personal journeys. Within this, the structural realities of making a living as an artist from Sunderland can’t be ignored, and our discussion turns to how their parallel hometown solo shows came about. McKnight and Robertson first met on the Yorkshire Sculpture International ‘Sculpture Network’ programme in 2021, a partnership between the Henry Moore Institute, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Hepworth Wakefield to support a cohort of Yorkshire-based artists with career development opportunities. Robertson describes how this was pivotal in the development of their work, recognising that with ‘The Ribs Begin to Rise’, ‘It’s the first time [they have] allowed [themself] to lean into those family connections, which is something I’ve always really admired about [McKnight’s] work.’ 

At this point in the two artists’ careers, Robertson also acknowledges that they are the more ‘powerful’ artist, and had been planning ‘The Ribs Begin to Rise’ for a year, whereas McKnight has been producing new work as part of two residencies and needed somewhere to show it. As such, Robertson used their leverage to create space for McKnight, and this way of navigating institutions with solidarity for other artists rather than in competition rings true to how McKnight described working class customs in relation to her current practice; ‘through the sense of hands-on tactility I feel a kinship with past family members and Sunderland as a place… using creative thinking and problem solving, making something out of nothing, and a canniness’. 

However, this isn’t to say that either artist seeks to straightforwardly romanticise working-class culture. As Robertson put it, ‘I’m not buzzin’ about how male-dominated our history is, and I’m not buzzin’ about extractive industries, or even the idea of work’, recalling the story of a relative who ran away to the beach when he was expected to start working as a miner at 15. This comes through in how their work references natural forms and the decay of industrial materials, while the exhibition as a whole plays with elevation and weight, evoking a sense of pressure and lightness in turn, with theatrical spotlighting, tarmac-grey walls and footage taken beneath the surface of the River Wear. 

McKnight, on the other hand, is explicitly interested in the politics of commemoration and memorialisation, which is manifestly present in Sunderland (I pass ‘Men of Steel’ by Graeme Hopper and Jim Roberts’ four-metre high Davy Lamp on the way to the gallery). One of the residencies that fed into McKnight’s exhibition was ‘Deindustrialisation and the Politics of Our Time’ (Dépot), an international research partnership that seeks to understand deindustrialisation in transnational or comparative terms. As part of ‘Past and Future Pact’, three banners hang from the ceiling of the NGCA’s first floor, pasted with cut-up headlines found by the artist in newspaper records of the Sunderland Antiquarian Society, published either just before or in the immediate aftermath of industrial closures. 

These phrases, presented as a text collage, highlight what McKnight describes as the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of the era, including an extract showing that even in 1992, when Monkwearmouth Colliery closed, the miners were already asking for a museum. There is a bittersweet irony to this sentiment, viewed within the soon-to-close Sunderland Glass Centre, which apparently requires millions of pounds worth of repairs. More than 37,000 people have signed a petition to save the institution, and campaigner David Vikery writes, ‘The University of Sunderland is running a slick public relations campaign to rid itself of the prestigious NGC at little cost. It may even make a good profit.’ This reality is noted by McKnight in ‘Conversations on Sunderland and its industry’: a moving image work featuring archive footage, conversations with the artist’s mother, and at one point, a voiceover detailing how the glass roof that was a particular attraction when the centre opened is now the reason for its imminent closure. 

The two exhibitions both feature work that is by turns metaphoric and literal, abstract and figurative, and as the artists speak with each other about the significance of these shows in this place, I am struck by how multimedia installation with its interplay of form, text, colour and sound is a particularly compelling way to communicate their pride and ambivalence. Discussing the continuities between their work, Robertson explained; ‘I titled one of the works [with] what had been my great grandfather’s job in the shipyards, Holder Up… and it reminds me of the words [McKnight] has printed on the outside of her installation ‘Holding on’ on one side and ‘Letting go’ on the other. There’s a tension in it, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw it because it’s something I’ve not been able to verbalise.’ This sense of tension, pressure and responsibility is palpable in how each artist describes their work, as McKnight put it, ‘the tension and ‘aliveness’…It’s balanced but could tip at any point.’ This is to the advantage of the work, and aptly reflects the conflicted nature of cultural investment in place, and social mobility for individuals. 

During the past decade or so of austerity and cuts to the arts, various initiatives have supported working-class creatives, like the organisation Arts Emergency, which mentors and supports under-resourced young people in London, Greater Manchester and Merseyside to pursue creative careers. There have also been campaigns to define ‘working class’ as a protected characteristic and to, in turn, define what constitutes working class. (I’m thinking here about the questions on equality monitoring forms that ask what category of job the main wage-earner in your house had when you were fourteen.) A recent group exhibition at Two Temple Place in London, ‘Lives Less Ordinary’, sought to ‘explore the overlooked richness and diversity of working-class life and creative expression’, and while both Robertson and McKnight point out that they haven’t been part of any recent survey exhibitions of ‘working class art’, this wider context of how class is approached in the arts is relevant in considering their equivocal approaches to representation and identity. The refusal of tropes and grounding in research in both bodies of work is invigorating, and from within this seemingly doomed millennium-era regional cultural asset, it is pertinent that each artist’s relationship to their hometown remains unresolved.