Roberts and Fearby met as teenagers at art school and have since developed a collaborative practice interrogating place, identity, and environmental consciousness. Their work has received several awards, including the 2025 Ludlow Landscape Prize, the 2013 Black Swan Heritage Prize for Living City, and the Castaways Sculpture Award Sustainability Prize in 2021 and 2023 for Pathogen and Insidious respectively. They have been finalists in the Black Swan Portrait Prize (2014, 2016) and the 2024 Perth Royal Art Prize for Landscape with Echoes of Duality—Sugarloaf Rock. Most recently, they were selected for Tracework 2026, a curated survey of contemporary art in the Southwest at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery.

 

Roberts and Fearby share an affinity and fascination with the natural world. In several collaborations they explored the interplay between man and the environment through the medium of sculpture. The artworks were installed in the natural environments of the coast and forest to add context and clarity to the concept. The use of recycled materials to create these works drew awareness to both the philosophical and physical impacts of humanity’s single-use consumerist culture.

 

In 2024, they began a series of large-scale landscapes evoking memory and place. Crafted from drawn and painted plywood tiles, these works imbue iconic views with nostalgia. Their modular construction allows for both cohesion and dissonance, mirroring how collective and individual experiences of place diverge and merge.Their work reimagines landscape as an active collaborator—shaping identity through memory, materiality, and movement. The work traces these entangled geographies, inviting viewers to reflect on their own spatial narratives.

 

In an era of climate anxiety, Roberts and Fearby offer an alternative mode of engagement with the natural world. These works do not shout or accuse; they ask viewers to remember what they love—and to consider, quietly, what it would mean to lose it.

 

This is art as gentle witness.The artists' earlier work engaged more directly with environmental threat. Pathogen and Insidious confronted viewers with the slow, creeping damage of ecological change. In their most recent work they have turned toward what is precious, what is worth protecting, what is already being carried forward in memory.