‘Faces can be trains, buses, mountains’: This unique artist might turn your world on its head

Thom Roberts is in his element as he weaves through the crowd, greeting friends and well-wishers with a hug, a tap on their head or by gently placing two fingers across their brow. It is the opening night of The Immersive World of Thom Roberts at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

With 100 works from across the past decade of Roberts’ professional art-making career, the exhibition is a joyous and expansive show for an artist with lived experience of intellectual disability. Roberts, 49, can be shy and a little reserved, but tonight he is exuberant.

“Faces can be trains, buses, mountains, the stone rock and the same the other way around”: Thom RobertsCredit: Martin Ollman

Governor-General Sam Mostyn is here to officially open the show. Roberts has dubbed her “the Excellent Antonio”, and she gets a tap on the head, too. Later, when the crowd cheers its approval at Roberts, he raises both arms above his head in a show of victory.

The exhibition brings together Roberts’ paintings and works on paper, painted sculptures, installations and animations. The subjects are people but also trains, skyscrapers, fast-food motifs and Muppets.

In Roberts’ worldview, people and objects are interrelated. All of his artworks may be considered portraits – or “portriffs” – in this network of associations, which explains why the NPG has mounted the exhibition.

Roberts, too, is part of this matrix of people, names and things, signing his artworks variously as Thom Roberts or Tim Tams and identifying with CountryLink trains and the 1000-metre Jeddah Tower under construction in Saudi Arabia.

Portriffs in The Immersive World of Thom RobertsCredit: Martin Ollman

“Faces can be trains, buses, mountains, the stone rock [the moon] and the same the other way around,” he explains in a written response to questions.

Roberts is represented by Studio A – a supported studio in Sydney for artists with intellectual disabilities – and has shown his work in the Archibald Prize, biennial show The National and other exhibitions. He has been artist in residence at Societas Raffaello Sanzio in Cesena, Italy, and participated in the 111th conference of the College Art Association in New York in 2023.

Indeed, Roberts is hard-working and prolific. In the space of a month recently, he completed his entries for both the Archibald and Sulman prizes, as well as the wall sculptures that greet visitors at the Canberra exhibition, including what may be a self-portrait of Roberts with a railway tunnel for a mouth and a skyscraper emerging from his head.

‘When Thom meets someone, he gives them a new name, and he might give them an avatar – he might identify them with a train or a building.’

Isobel Parker Philip, curator

Another of the large-scale installations is an array of 24 paintings called Fan of Feeling Portriffs. Roberts painted the portraits as a way of helping him identify and express his emotions, and they have titles such as Puffing, Scared-Scary, Sad-Crying, Trusting and Giggling. The images also have been reproduced as a set of 24 cards, which can be purchased in the gift shop.

The face called Nice has a tangy green complexion and a wide smile the colour of calamine lotion. Another face, reproduced on Roberts’ T-shirt, has strongly expressive eyebrows, six eyes and a blue, downcast mouth.

What’s that one called? “Worried,” Roberts says.

In an interview, Roberts is assisted by Studio A’s artistic director and chief executive, Gabrielle Mordy, who acts as both prompt and interpreter. Sitting on a bench in one of the exhibition galleries, Roberts lays out six of his portriff cards.

“That’s happy,” he says, tapping the card and then tapping each of the other cards in turn.“Sad. Mad. Thinking. Surprise. Still thinking.”

Interactive ping-pong room at the opening of the exhibition.Credit: Martin Ollman

The exhibition curator, Isobel Parker Philip, regards him as one of Australia’s most exciting contemporary artists.

“For Thom, portraiture is a gesture,” she says. “So when Thom meets someone, he gives them a new name, and he might give them an avatar – he might identify them with a train or a building.

“He is applying metaphors and ideas that can be attributed to people. When you look at the exhibition, you can start to understand the complexity of those names and those relationships because sometimes the same name is attributed to different entities. It’s not arbitrary.”

The unschooled, childlike art produced by people with an intellectual disability was once described as outsider art, a problematic term that Parker Philip has not used here.

“I find it a tricky term because outsider implies insider, and those distinctions overlook elements of creative practice that actually can provide some of the most exciting work,” she says. “All art is about giving us ways to see the world differently, and that is exactly what Thom does.”

Thom Roberts’ portrait of Adam (Shane Simpson).Credit: Martin Ollman

A favourite painting of Roberts’ is his portrait of Sydney lawyer Shane Simpson, whom he calls Adam. The picture was selected as a finalist in the 2021 Archibald Prize. Like many of the subjects in Roberts’ portriffs he has four eyes.

Simpson was instrumental in setting up Studio A in 2016 and was its inaugural chairman. How would he describe his friendship with Roberts?

“It’s very hard to say what the basis of any friendship is,” Simpson says. “We share a friendship. None of my other friends say that, when they grow up, they want to be me … which is what Thom says.”

He reflects that when he first became involved with Studio A, he retreated to his “safe space” and tended to avoid interacting with the artists there.

“I wasn’t scared, but I just didn’t know how to interact with people with an intellectual disability,” he says. “If my involvement with Studio A has given me one important gift, it’s ‘Get over yourself and relate to the human before you’.”

Similarly, The Immersive World of Thom Roberts invites the viewer to get over themselves and enter imaginatively into Roberts’ experience – to see the world through two or even four eyes.

Roberts intends to keep making art and surprising people with his generous and all-embracing vision for many years to come. “I am still going to be an artist until I’m a very old man in the future,” he says.

The Immersive World of Thom Roberts is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until July 20.