Maggie Roberts | Sheer Presence: While They Are Here…

IMT Gallery is proud to present Sheer Presence: While They Are Here…, a solo exhibition by multimedia artist Maggie Roberts, exploring presence as a transformative force through watercolour paintings, digital collage, textiles and video. Responding directly to the ongoing ecological collapse, violent destruction, and the pervasive sense of uncertainty, Sheer Presence acts as a cosmopolitical manifestation tool—a profound call to remain awake, intentional, and attuned to unseen forces shaping our shared reality.

Drawing inspiration from Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ recent book, What Is Life? Evolution as Computation (MIT Press, 2025), the exhibition explores Sheer Presence as the distinct intrusion of another entity—often animal or virtual—disrupting the human order. Echoing the 8th-century Tibetan Buddhist Tattvasangraha text (verses 2892-2893), Roberts emphasises presence as the fundamental ability of an entity to profoundly influence and alter its environment, reshaping perceptions and expanding experiences of reality.

At the heart of the exhibition is an ancient manifestation grid, activated through six thematic “nodes”: ancestors><power; the invisibles><universe of multiple dimensions; crystal light><purpose; clarity><silent focus; creativity><collective imagination; and abundance><manifesting change. Each node directly addresses contemporary feelings of disconnection, fragmentation, overwhelming distraction, and destabilisation, offering pathways for healing, imagination, and renewal.

Roberts invites visitors to follow Lines of Intention across this geometric terrain—a multi-dimensional map designed to reconnect with deep time, invisible agents, and ancestral wisdom. The sacred geometry that underpins manifestation practices is believed to align personal intentions with broader universal energies. At its centre sits the octopus, Roberts’ Avatar of Manifestation, representing fluidity, adaptability, distributed intelligence and the authentic self.

Within the images, crystals and hagstones (naturally perforated stones shaped over millennia by ocean movement) serve as portals. Linked to folklore, protection, and divination, hagstones reveal hidden truths, amplifying the exhibition’s resonance with multidimensional frequencies, agents and stories to foster the power of the imagination to bring change.

ABOUT MAGGIE ROBERTS

Maggie Roberts has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision throughout her career, exhibiting as a solo artist and as the collaborative artist Orphan Drift (which she co-founded in London with Ranu Mukherjee in 1994). The work is increasingly underpinned by ecological issues and concerns, entanglements of human, technology and the wider biosphere as part of a process of co-evolution. Orphan Drift employs various media – video, 3D animation, sound, performance, installation, and text – particularly speculative experimental fiction. In recent years they have been considering artificial intelligence through the somatic tendencies of an octopus – as a distributed, many minded consciousness, manifesting in If AI Were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery, San Francisco, her IMT Gallery Becoming Octopus Meditations, ISCRI (partnered by the Serpentine Gallery’s AI Lab) and the current 0rphan Drift 9 Brains project. Their installations, performances and speculative fictions have been exhibited nationally and internationally in gallery and museum spaces for over three decades. Other recent exhibitions include May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow; Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Matter Fictions, Berardo Museum, Lisbon; Speculative Fictions, PDX Contemporary, Portland; Eat Code and Die, Lomex Gallery, New York, and in the book Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan.

Recent publications include Aqueous Humours, Fluid Ground (Ed. Kirsten Cooke and Melanie Jackson, pub. Matt’s Gallery); Serpentine Gallery’s Future Art Ecosystems 4; OctoGANN a Fiction (Creative Practice Journal); Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans (Routledge Press) and Pattern and Texture as Communication (Radical Matter Journal).

Roberts teaches Fine Art Critical Studies at Central St Martins, UAL and also lectures at many other UK art schools, and presents Orphan Drift’s work at symposia internationally. She is represented by IMT Gallery.

PERFORMANCE: 5 SEPTEMBER AT 8:30 PM

To launch the exhibition, we are thrilled to host a live performance by sound artist John Wild and dancers Ciar Wild and Violet Savage. The 30-minute performance will evolve as a fluid dialogue between John’s sonic response to Sheer Presence and the dancers’ improvised duet.

Ciar Wild and Violet Savage are both recent graduates of the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. Since graduating, Ciar has toured internationally, from the Lila López International Festival in Mexico to the Miami International Ballet Festival and recently led an Arts Council England-funded dance improvisation project at Chisenhale Dance Space. 

Violet has developed and performed work at Somerset House; worked with choreographer Holly Blakey on Fragments of a Process (with Maxwell Sterling and Linder) at Hayward Gallery, and performed in her works Phantom and Wound with Teeth at the Queen Elizabeth Hall earlier this year. The dancers have performed together in London with The Burrow and at Spanners.

John Wild is an experimental sound artist, educator, and critical AI narratives researcher. For this performance, he draws on field recordings and algorithm-generated feedback to create Mutation Audio—a spacious, textural soundscape. His recent projects include Metabolic Drift with Ciar Wild and Violet Savage, Iklectik; Ana-Cartographies, Floating Projects HK; and White Noise with Ciar Wild, Corsica Studios.