“The most political thing I do is get up every morning and call myself an artist” Rob Birch challenges the elitism of the art world.

The working-class creative reveals the struggles he faced becoming an artist and how they have informed his recent exhibition, Collapsing New People.

“Everything is political,” Rob Birch explains over Zoom when asked if his artworks are politically charged. He is wearing a t-shirt with the title of his recent exhibition Collapsing New People, written across the chest. The exhibition was held at The Muse, a gallery on Portobello Road, throughout October.

The exhibition included a collection of large, fragmented digital portraits created from original photographs which are then overlayed and distorted with strokes of paint and elements from other paintings. In some of the portraits, recognisable features such as a nose or eye emerge. They don’t immediately look like portraits but, for Birch, that is the point. This series is his most abstract, “a logical progression” in his words and the works challenge portraiture as a literal, superficial “representation of a particular person.”

Rob Birch is a visual artist studying for a PhD at the Royal College of Art. His digital portraits incorporate elements from both popular culture and ‘high art’ creating portraits that are recognisable and unsettlingly unfamiliar.

Within his earlier series, The Materiality of Identity, Ronald Macdonald, a Storm Trooper and CCTV cameras melt into painted and photographic elements reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s disturbing portraits. This merging of high and popular culture reveals how Birch is “trying to get rid of this sort of hierarchy of the arts and culture,” believing that “culture exists on all levels.” This outlook comes from his working-class upbringing which contrasts with the elitism of the art world.

Birch was born and brought up in Peckham in the 1960s, “not the best place to be a sensitive, creative type” he reveals. The elitism of the art world is widely reported and written about.

One report states that only 18.2% of people working in music, performing and visual arts are from working-class origins. Another 2023 report conducted by Kings College London states that “people from less privileged backgrounds often struggle to get their first break in the creative industries.”

Battling against this reality, Rob started creating artwork “to get some sort of approval from his friends and family” and spent all his spare time in the art room during school. It then took five years for Birch to get onto an art degree course after doing an Art Foundation at Ravensbourne College in West London, also doing an Art History evening class during that time.

Eventually, he attended Norwich School of Art where Ana Maria Pachenco was the Head of Fine Art. Birch fondly describes Pachenco as a “wonderful force of nature” who “really cared about her students.” She changed the nature of Norwich School of Art, being the first woman to hold this position in the UK, and accepted Birch onto the course.

After the closing of Collapsing New People, Birch is in the process of writing a funding application for his PhD, reflecting on his upbringing and experiences which have allowed him to create works that challenge the elitism of the art world and reveal “a working-class notion of self.” 

Birch poignantly reflects that “the most political thing I do is get up every morning and call myself an artist. That's radical, and revolutionary because I was not meant to be one and that, to me, is enough to sustain me.”