Esther Rolinson is an award winning British multi-media artist. She works between the UK and Italy and in 2022 established a studio in the Alps of Piemonte, contributing to the creative economy and burgeoning renaissance in historical mountain sites.

Rolinson’s artworks are explorative and varied in form. She uses new media technology and architectural materials as well as the long-established artistic languages such as drawing and sculpture. Her works have a starting point of drawings made by hand. In a sophisticated gesture she constructs complex systems and forms that convey powerful sensory experiences and mysterious stories. She extends these into three dimensions and programmed light movements in her installations. Fearlessly crossing the borders between digital and analogue she places simple manual processes and advanced digital new media solutions side by side. Her works include drawings, animations, immersive installations, performance and large-scale public works. Whatever the form, she directly invites her viewer to participate intensely in the artistic experience.

Her intention to communicate consciousness through the observation of physical sensations has steered her to work with light. Due to its immediacy and potential to affect our senses, light is an important feature of her artistic process. In her recent work ‘Luminations’ (Cleethorpes Promenade, UK, 2022) she took the traditional language of British seaside lighting to soaring heights in a sophisticated 500m permanent installation.

Rolinson's work boldly addresses universal concepts which she researches through deep studio practice. In her current role as Lead Artist for a new £100milion surgical centre in the UK she asks ‘What is the function of trust in both a care environment and our general lives’. In her light installation ‘Ten Thousand Thoughts’ (funded by Arts Council England, 2020-24) she illustrates the importance of disidentification from continuous thinking as an essential feature of mental health through her personal making practice.

Underpinning all of her artworks is the persistent drive for comprehension of personal and collective purpose. She asks: ‘how can our daily behaviours and emotional intelligence contribute to our survival in the face of climate crisis?’. She engages in this profound enquiry from both a systems-based and scientific view, and through following her personal reflective process undertaken over thirty years ‘to alter the course of my own ancestral river’. Rolinson’s artworks investigate how often experiences that come with great difficulty can also bring about true wonder and be the tools at the heart of transformational growth. In her new experimental film work ‘The Wisdom of Losing (Yourself)’ Art CHI, Chicago (2024) which includes a script from her creative writing practice, she points to our connection with an encompassing fabric of life.

Over the last 20 years, Rolinson has worked internationally, making permanent and temporary public space commissions. She has exhibited in museums, galleries, art centres and festivals and has a long list of solo and group shows. Esther Rolinson is in prominent collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Computer Art Society, London. She has recently won a commission to create a major work for a science research building in Cambridge. In this new venture she is reflecting on the idea of balance as an essential concept for humanity to address if it is to reconfigure itself as an important conscious component of nature rather than as it’s consumer.