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About

Personal Statement 16.06.09

Christina is based in Hertfordshire and works in her studio located near Hitchin. She is currently studying part-time at Wimbledon College of Art for a Masters in FIne Art.

Within my practice I explore the nature of our physical reality through the intangible medium of line. I am concerned with using it to outline and map our everyday, mundane environments and look to create representations that trigger our memories and associations. Running through my work is a strong emphasis on interior spaces, signs of home and shelter. By using this elusive and ghostly medium to trace the solid, tangible and real, I am attempting to rediscover something of the nature of our human reality. I am interested in the unreachable space of illusion and imagination and use drawing as a link between this imagined world and its physical reality. My drawings map out a suggestion of a physical but through simplicity and illusion they give a weight and presence to emptiness, creating a vertiginous effect that leaves the viewer for a moment hanging somewhere between knowing where is space and where is solid. I attempt to create drawings that play with the viewer’s perception and expectation as they inhabit the space.

The performance element came from the inquiry in to how a drawing can be used to interact with and record a space and time. I wanted to record a moving and progressing space that made the act of drawing the key element with the outcome becoming secondary. By altering the expected viewer-artist roles I wanted to attempt to challenge the traditional triangle of communication in viewing a drawing of artist-drawing-viewer and creating a new dialogue of observation and interaction. The viewer is the observed and I, the artist am the observer as well as the piece itself. There was also the consideration of housing myself within the work, being shielded by its protective layer as I become more of an ambiguous presence within the space, disguised within my role. I exist within a view that feels privileged as no other person can access it.

From my past performances all that are left are the skins of my houses that show the record of past interactions. By re-showing these drawings alongside a live drawing, they hang in a suspended existence, static and empty, referring to a moment that has terminated, superseded by the live, the happening and the current. The drawings have compressed time and are left referring to the departed. I feel as the drawer that I am frantically chasing time and trying to capture the reality of it.

I find that the more I explore the process and illusion of drawing, the more its possibilities open out. It seems to be a medium that becomes an extension of us. It is fluid, changeable, and continually questioning our perception. It mimics and records our own experiences and imagination. It, like ourselves seems to contradict, limit, extend, confuse and create, questioning our real and giving us a language to explore the human condition.