Universus is an ongoing body of work exploring how humans create, preserve, and transform meaning through symbols. The work investigates the social contracts formed around shared visual languages—how symbols create connection, identity, belief systems, and cultural memory —and what happens when their meanings evolve, fracture, or are reimagined over time.

Drawing from speculative cartography, typography, petroglyphs, ancient rock art, mythology, pyromancy, divination, and systems thinking, Michael Robinson creates paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, and installations that operate as evolving archives of symbolic exchange.

Recurring glyphs, invented alphabets, diagrams, maps, and pyromantic languages move between abstraction and recognition, creating systems that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic. Rather than presenting fixed narratives, Universus invites interpretation and discovery—transforming the studio into a site of mapping and inquiry where symbols become tools for exploring memory, identity, intuition, culture, and possible futures.