🌟 Maggie Roberts - Sheer Presence: While They Are Here…

IMT Gallery is excited to showcase the remarkable solo exhibition by multimedia artist Maggie Roberts. This captivating display delves into the theme of presence as a transformative force, featuring a blend of watercolour paintings, digital collage, textiles, and video installations. In light of the ongoing ecological collapse, violent upheavals, and an ever-growing sense of uncertainty, Sheer Presence serves as a powerful cosmopolitical tool, urging us to stay awake, intentional, and attuned to the invisible forces that shape our reality. 🌏✨

Drawing from Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ thought-provoking book What Is Life? Evolution as Computation (MIT Press, 2025), the exhibition presents Sheer Presence as an intriguing intrusion of another entity—often animal or virtual—into human order. Echoing the insights from the 8th-century Tibetan Buddhist text Tattvasangraha, Roberts underscores presence as the ability of an entity to significantly alter its environment and enrich our perception of reality.

Central to the exhibition is an ancient manifestation grid activated through six thematic nodes: ancestors >< manifesting change. Each node confronts modern feelings of disconnection, fragmentation, distraction, and destabilisation, presenting avenues for healing, imagination, and renewal. 🌿

Visitors are invited to navigate Lines of Intention across this geometric landscape—a multidimensional map that reconnects us with deep time, unfamiliar agents, and ancestral wisdom. The sacred geometry underlying these manifestation practices is believed to align individual intentions with universal energies. At the heart of this artwork sits the octopus, Roberts’ Avatar of Manifestation, symbolizing fluidity, adaptability, distributed intelligence, and the authentic self. 🐙

In her visual pieces, crystals and hagstones—naturally perforated stones shaped over time by ocean currents—act as portals. Deeply rooted in folklore, protection, and divination, hagstones bring forth hidden truths, amplifying the exhibition’s resonance with multidimensional frequencies and stories that harness the power of imagination to inspire change. 🔮

✨ About Maggie Roberts

Maggie Roberts has dedicated her career to examining the boundaries between human and machine vision, both as a solo artist and as the co-founder of the collaborative project 0rphan Drift alongside Ranu Mukherjee in London. Her work increasingly focuses on ecological issues and the interconnections between humanity, technology, and the broader biosphere within the context of co-evolution.

Through various media, including video, 3D animation, sound, performance, installation, and text, 0rphan Drift's explorations often touch upon speculative fiction. Recently, their work has tackled the concept of artificial intelligence, likening it to the somatic nature of an octopus—a multi-faceted consciousness manifesting in projects like If AI Were Cephalopod and Becoming Octopus Meditations at IMT Gallery.

With over three decades of exhibition history, their captivating installations, performances, and speculative fictions have appeared in galleries and museums worldwide. Recent exhibitions include May the Other Live in Me at Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow, Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, and many more.

Maggie Roberts also shares her expertise in Fine Art Critical Studies as a lecturer at Central St Martins, UAL, and at various other art schools in the UK.

Discover more about Maggie Roberts and her groundbreaking work at IMT Gallery.