With a history in photography, Rob Irving works with moving images and sound. His current long-term project riffs off his doctoral research into environmental perceptual fields by looking at art in a healing environment: how shifts in the grammar of place cause experiential and behavioural, even physiological, responses to it. Artists Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst (Crab & Bee) said this about Irving in their book The Pattern (2020):

‘‘[Irving] is a dealer in truth and half-truth, a diagrammer, a brewer of modern folklore, a shaper of shifts…Working in between simplicities, Rob has mapped a boggy yet inscribed terrain into which we have been grateful to step, if gingerly; one where myth and mathematics and serious empirical desk-based research never quite meet but leave invitingly half-existing footpaths and cave entrances accessible and ruined chapel gateways ajar.
As trickster-geo-physicist he has measured the presence of half-there/half-hoaxed shadow sculptures under everywhere: “an extension of mythogeography, this is mythoarchaeology… with data.” We have sat in a room and chatted with Rob, but we have never walked with him (we’d like to). As with so many of our un-walked-with guides, it was as if he walked with us; on adventures which, in retrospect, only half-happened, or happened so vividly we can hardly imagine them as possible.’

Crab & Bee, The Pattern, Triarchy Press, Axminster, UK, 2020