About
Robert Columba was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’.
He lives on the border between County Armagh in Northen Ireland in the United Kingdom and County Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland.
His personal stories, like so many others, spring from ‘conflict & uprootedness’.
The ‘Long Walk’, nor ‘The Famine Story’ nor ‘Enforced Emigration’ belong only to his ancestors.
He laments the loss of home through its destruction in war, and its desecration through subversion of the ‘body-politic’.
These are the seemingly inescapable man-made burdens carried down through our history into the images we witness today.
Those who deliberately perpetuate the injustice of homelessness are destined to become condemned to eternity accompanying Sisyphus pushing rocks up a hill.
Robert holds an MA in Philosophy from Birkbeck, University of London, where he examined the similarities in the tortured natures of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the Father of The Catholic Church, St Jerome the Penitent.
He is undertaking PhD research at Exeter University, exploring the philosophy of architecture, and examining the ‘phenomenology of home’ in the work of Bachelard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and others as it becomes expressed in the material and art of domestic architecture.
A Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Housing, he is an Affiliate Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a member of The Royal Institute of Philosophy and The Irish Philosophical Society.
“you are a guest of nature - behave”.
He is inspired by the creative and practical work of the architect and philosopher Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
He tries to live according to Hundertwasser’s observation;
His hope for his artistic and academic work is, that it becomes ‘shaped’ not ‘warped’, ‘enlightened’ not ‘weighed down’, ‘freed not caged’ by closed minds.