The artist was born in North Wales and trained in Wrexham, London and Glasgow. Against an alternating pattern of strips of solid colour, Roberts sets sinister objects - such as mortuary tables with shrouded corpses. These are painted with some agitation and manipulation in oil paint - which at a distance has a powerful naturalism against the softly pulsating background acrylic colour. When questioned in 1995 the artist said that Velaszquez was the artist living or dead with whom she would most like to have a conversation.