After almost a decade, Robert Ikin comes back to the art world

"I keep finding pieces I've forgotten existed," Ikin said, standing in a bar of sunlight thrown across the chalky table centred in his cluttered studio which, he assured, "doesn't normally look like this."

He grabbed a box frame containing printed graphics and clay models while he spoke, fussing over it before suddenly looking exasperated.

"This piece could go in the exhibition, too, if I fix it up a little; it could maybe be a triptych," he said.

Ikin - a multimodal artist whose history in the Tasmanian art scene dates back to 1962 - has been preparing diligently for his first exhibition in close to a decade, tinkering with old works to update them, making entirely new ones.

For an artist who creates because "that's just what he does", and one who is now having to pick between hundreds of works made in the last eight years, it's been a little frenetic and dash daunting as a task.

"This is a really important time for him," said Gardie Palmer, Robert's partner and an artist herself. Her studio sits right next to Robert's at their home - a property Ikin has lived in for nearly 40 years that's built into the forest near Nunamara and could hardly be any more picturesque.

"He has such an ethic, and for him, picking from that output requires as much concentration as making," she said.

The ethic, and the output, has provided Ikin with a storied career in the art world: his pieces are in plenty of Tasmania's public collections, including at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and at the Tasmanian Art Gallery and Museum in Hobart.

It also included a commission from the state government to make a massive public art ceramic called Mandala and artistic residencies in Paris.

And The Examiner's art connoisseurs of yesteryear would fondly remember Ikin as one of the founders of the Launceston Art Cooperative, which exhibited more than 100 fortnightly shows until 1996 at the Snakepit - a disused warehouse-turned-gallery.

Now the last eight years of that hard work, and some from the past, have spilled out from Ikin's atelier into the his home study as he prepares his return to Tasmania's art world.

The pieces take up desks, lean on walls and stand in stacks, making it easy to see why Ikin is calling the new show a kind of "accumulation of an entire career".

But the physical volume of works - which range from the painted to the sculptural - aren't the only apt reasoning behind that mounting motif of progress; every piece is also concerned with the ideas that define him as an artist.

"You never change, really - you don't reinvent yourself all the time," Ikin said.

"I've had the luxury of not having to think about exhibiting, which I think can sometimes inhibit you - that kind of anxiety of getting the work done and misunderstanding yourself.

"Now I've got all this understanding that I can share."

In the better part of the last decade, Ikin's work has tended toward the surreal, though it has always been prevalent in his work, which he said tries to recreate his feelings on the state of the world.

"People will form their ideas about them, I know that to be true," Ikin said.

"All I really want people to see is that this is, for me, what it looks like to address art daily. To create because that's just what you have to do, like breathing.:"

Robert Ikin's exhibition Yet Another Short History arrives at Launceston College's Gallows Art Space on May 16 and run until the first week of June.