this is sadlucy! the internet home of Matthew Robins: artist, musician, animator and puppet-maker

WHILE YOU ARE ALSEEP AT NIGHT Matthew is awake drawing pictures of crocodiles and cutting bits out of Barbra Streisand records to make her sing his name. He makes robots out of paper and cardboard soap operas.

When he is on-stage with his band, The Times noted "Robins's music is in the indie-folk vein. Peppered with pop inflections, the tunes slip easily between tempos that vary from klezmer-like jauntiness to a lilting waltz. The tales they convey are odd slivers of surreal whimsy."

Combining music, live animation, shadow puppetry, stories about foxes, audience craft- participation, and made-up games, Matthew has been touring his live show around the country for the last five years, performing at comedy clubs, museums, art galleries, the Royal College of Surgeons, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, as well as The National Theatre, The Barbican, The Roundhouse, The Little Angel Theatre, The Traverse in Edinburgh and the Waterfront in Belfast.

Matthew also makes films and animations, including commissions from Arts Admin/Xenoki, Dumbworld, The Barbican and Opera North.

After watching Matthew's recent Barbican Christmas show The Guardian wrote, "The whole thing feels like watching a silent movie in which every aspect has been created by a wayward child genius."

Inspired by his up-bringing in the West Country living by the sea, and narrowly avoiding death as his first school slipped down a mine, Matthew's stories and songs are about animals, death, monsters, the ocean and love. When he wasn't outside looking for insects, or sharks washed up beyond the high-tide line, Matthew was at home watching old science-fiction b-movies, black & white musicals and Sesame Street.

Recent shows include Lullaby at the Barbican, and Something Very Far Away at the Unicorn Theatre, which won the 2012 Off-West-End Theatre Award for Best Production for Young People.

Michael Billington in The Guardian noted that Matthew's work for Katie Mitchell's Beauty and the Beast at the National Theatre had "something of the deft wit of Picasso sketches."

    "What drives his miniaturist universe is the romance of friendship and, as a corollary, an underlying longing to belong. Itʼs a place of boyhood crushes, loneliness and gentle obsessions that contain an implied tolerance for taking people as they are."
The Times