POET OF THE ZEITGIST

Propelled by Duchamp's legacy of the ready-made, yet infused with a classical sense of craft, Robbie Rowlands finds things such as discarded boom gates, telegraph poles, goalposts, old iron beds, what-have-you. Then, armed with various saws, he fastidiously cuts, slices and tenderly realigns them. The result is at once comic and elegiac. His once-vaulting steel goalpost, symbol of national pride, worms in a collapsed deflated spiral. Telegraph pole becomes jumbled monument to a failed industrial utopianism but also tribute to mighty river redgums. Rowlands is folk poet of the zeitgist and is to be watched.

ROSS MOORE - The Age, Friday Oct 24, 2008