Artist Statement
My name is Robin Elliott Knowles and I am an artist. I am passionate about history, LGBTQ+ people, feminism, myth and legend. I put all these themes into my work.
Robin Elliott-Knowles is an associate artist of the Project Artworks Collective and a member of The Neurocultures Collective. He graduated in summer 2021with a 2:1 in Fine Art Degree from Sussex Coast College, having won the Roland Fiddy Award for Drawing. His art practice largely involves painting, drawing, and creating graphic-novel like illustrations, all considering key themes of intersectionality, colonialism and transgenderism.
Robin is also the curator of the B-Movie Fan Club, a monthly screening at Hastings Electric Palace cinema running for more than 10 years, sharing cult horror/Sci-Fi films with a dedicated audience.
​
'I am also autistic, something which informs my view on the world around me.'
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLIC WORKS
STIM CINEMA takes the action of stimming – ‘the practice of physical repetition as a way of taking sensory pleasure in recurrence, or of expressing and alleviating anxiety, and a common trait of autistic experience’ – as its starting point, connecting delight in repetition to the birth of cinema and to the contemporary fascination with GIFS.
​
The exhibition invites the audience to take pleasure in discovering hidden movements in every part of the frame, reminding us all of the pleasure we share in seeing actions rock and loop, and revealing that such stimulation is not only common to autistic experience but in the DNA of the moving image.
The exhibition encourages the viewer to consider our shared neurodivergence, and to discover stimming as a joyous perceptual and bodily possibility, one which challenges the very notion of normativity and is in fact a desirable state.
'STIM CINEMA' - NOTTINGHAM CASTLE - NEUROCULTURES COLLECTIVE
THE STIMMING POOL
Created by a collective of neurodivergent filmmakers in an attempt to provide an alternative and artistic take on what it's like to live with neurodivergence in a chaotic world not made for those who are different.
The Neurocultures Collective, Benjamin Brown, Georgia Bradburn, Sam Chown-Ahern, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker & Steven Eastwood / United Kingdom / 2024 / World Premiere
CURRENT PROJECT FOCUS
ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES
Robin is currently working on a number of historically inspired narrative illustrations which will form an epic re-telling of history. Inspired by the work of Stan Sakai, these anthropomorphic and re-sexed characters, create a vision of history where gender is not a barrier to achievement, but where race and religion still act as a catalyst for events.
