Robert Verrill was born in Stapleford, Nottingham, in 1955. His working-class father was a factory hand, then engineer, and finally a Manager. His mother worked variously in a car parts factory, a supermarket and later, for much longer, as a dispenser in a chemist’s shop.

Robert Verrill, 2025. Photo Courtesy: Wan Ru Lin

Verrill studied Town and Country Planning at Manchester University (1973-78). He had demonstrated an early aptitude for drawing, but his working class parents encouraged their first generation university graduate sons to pursue practical career paths instead.

A chance encounter at a fine art show at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery exposed Verrill to Peter Lanyon’s work, then a diversity of performance pieces. It opened his eyes to creative possibilities. After forty years as a town planner, an architect, and a junior schoolteacher, he took the plunge in 2019 and pursued an MFA at Wimbledon College of Art. It is here that he first explored three-dimensional sculpture, video and performance art.

He rented a studio in Potters Bar and made large abstract paintings. Increasingly, however, his attention was drawn to an eclectic community of businesses on his doorstep and a world of activity on the service side street at the rear of his studio. Waste from a neighbouring Fish & Chip shop,  an office cleaning company, a t-shirt  whole seller, recording studio, lawnmower repair and a scrap metal dealer began to feed a lifelong passion for collecting, be it matches, stamps and more, now transformed into a quest to repurpose discarded materials.

Drawing inspiration from Mark Dion, Julie Becker, Rachel Whiteread, and Phyllida Barlow, artists who similarly engage with themes of rubbish and sustainability, Verrill stashed away Styrofoam fish box waste with no clear purpose in mind. An idea finally crystalised and took shape for his 2019 A Part of the Main show at St. Pancras’ Crypt Gallery, London’s oldest site of Christian worship.

Used fish boxes—potent historic symbols of Christian faith and vessels for dead fish—can, in this case, be seen as coffins, mirroring St. Pancras’ role as a final resting place for figures such as sculptor John Flaxman, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, ultimately becoming pillars of support.

A journey from sea to shop, shaped by labour of many hands, these large and vividly marked travel boxes have been lifted from unceremonious street alleys and transformed.

They speak of exploitation and marine devastation, overfishing, drilling for more and more oil. Verrill helps them rise once more, with dignity. Stacked like blocks of limestone masonry, these ghostly insertions are revitalised as architectural supports for the Crypt’s aged alcoves.

Robert Verrill, *A Part of the Main*, 2019, found fish boxes, variable dimensions. Photo Courtesy: Robert Verrill.

While highlighting and celebrating engineering and design skills central to the creation and distribution of capitalist consumption, Verrill’s evolving artistic process thrives on chance discoveries and serendipitous encounters. His methodology serves as a mirror of mainstream manufacturing in reverse through meticulous and cumulative collection, cleaning, sorting, and sifting of discarded materials.

Robert Verrill, *The God of Flexible Office Space*, 2021, found objects, variable dimensions. Photo Courtesy: Robert Verrill.

The God of Flexible Office Space, intertwining a cacophony of discarded objects into a single monument and a deity, exemplifies one such fortuitous creative collisions. A metal clothes dryer, paired with a set of improvised wooden trestles, creates a striking contrast of materials and manufacturing styles. Made by builders engaged in house renovations, the rough-hewn trestles form an earthbound base reflecting the fruit of mortal labour. Rising above, an airier, flimsier metal structure evokes a loftier, winged deity poised for rapid ascension. Tension between grounded craftsmanship and elevated ideals are reflected through this duality.

Robert Verrill, *You And Me We Are Family* installation, Greatorex Street Gallery, 2025. Found objects, variable dimensions. Photo Courtesy: Thomas Brewin

Verrill’s 2025 solo show You And Me We Are Family exhibit further builds on an emerging practice of finding and transforming hauntingly beautiful artifacts. The journey begins along a long, darkened corridor, illuminated by ghostly, floating forms hanging in space. On closer inspection, they are ethereal impressions composed of multi-pack water bottles.

The Greatorex Street Gallery space is transformed into two distinct yet interconnected environments. At its centre lies a shelter, salvaged flat packed cardboard fashioned around windows of cereal packaging. Its interior houses a series of columns, stacked and illuminated Styrofoam fish boxes, which breathe life into this darkened space. Glyphic-scrawled surfaces hold a battered, haunting vitality as scars bearing tales and witness to their former lives.

Outside, a canopy of interconnected fish box lids hangs, bound together with found ribbons, shredded t-shirt strips, school uniform ties, and shoelaces. Street treasures catching an eye and tucked into a jacket pocket. ‘Made in Vietnam’, printed above us on cardboard ceiling, whispers of past lives and global commerce once carried.

Light filters through the canopy casting intricate shadows on corrugated walls. In a corner, a discarded Barbie Dreamhouse lies crushed by the weight of broken dreams. Meandering beneath the canopy evokes memories of makeshift cardboard childhood play dens, a sensation of being underwater, a feeling of walking down makeshift markets street in Asia.

Reflecting on this structure, Verrill shares, “I realised its shape and size is just like a garage which served as my father’s workshop space. I still remember when we sold our family home. Mum had to move out. Visiting the garage one last time, now stripped of his tools and belongings, was an emotional experience. Maybe that memory stayed with me. I’ve somehow rebuilt it in a strange way.”

The translucent wall, created from recycled cereal packaging, is also homage to his mother who, Verrill explains, “used to save these packets because they were waxy, waterproof, and airtight. Perfect for preserving food. She wrapped her cakes in them.” In doing so, she passed down wisdom, now lost to the winds in the advent of plastic bags.

Robert Verrill, *Deliverance*, 2025. Found objects, variable dimensions. Photo Courtesy: Annette Fernando

We encounter Deliverance on reaching the end of the installation. It is a sculpture made from an abandoned black corrugated delivery box found behind a bike repair shop. It feels a forgotten remnant, cast off at the back of the gallery space, yet commanding attention. A red exercise mat unfurls to the floor like a tongue, a ravenous, greedy mouth caught mid-vomit. A wooden horse, head shorn clean and surreal, leaps out of the structure to further evoke vivid childhood memories.

Robert Verrill, *Deliverance*, 2025. Found objects, variable dimensions. Photo Courtesy: Thomas Brewin

When asked whether his childhood influenced this piece, Verrill recalls a distant memory of his schoolteacher presenting a random set of objects and asking him to create stories. This long-forgotten exercise seemingly continues to linger and inform his work.

On exiting the show, into a busy street evidencing waste and destruction in our post-industrial world, Verrill’s invitation to pause and reflect holds more weight. We might find ourselves wondering: What could I do with this discarded object? What would Verrill do? He encourages us to step into our inner-artist shoes, reconsider overlooked potential, and rediscover creativity in our resource-filled surroundings.

He challenges us to re-evaluate worth in everyday objects and consequences of discarding them to an ignoble fate. In doing so, he also draws us back to childhood spaces of wonder and imagination. His work inspires us to approach our environment with renewed curiosity and care.

To learn more about Robert Verrill, follow him on Instagram.

Annette Panthiyage Fernando

Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED

Robert Verrill

George Moore

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