Coiled NZ Flax embroidered with the Artist's hair, 44cm, 2024

“Tracing the Lagoon” maps a personally important, naturally occurring body of water on my homeland. Water is a contentious subject in Australia - the land of droughts and flooding rains. This work questions: Who, or what, has the right to water?

Red wine on paper, 150 × 100cm, 2024

Ivy wood and raw cotton, 57cm, 2023

I use what I find to make what I feel.

Garlic skin stitched with the Artist’s hair, embroidery needles. 2024

I use what I find to make what I feel or, what I want to feel.

Stillness is revelatory.

This delicate work shifts with the air currents in the room and with time. Asking who or what is still? And what does this reveal?

Stick, echidna quills and NZ flax

How does one craft a tree in Maigh Eo?

Leaf skeleton embroidered with strands of the artist's hair, 10.5cm, 2023

2018-2020 Red wine on paper 310 × 150cm

Garlic skin stitched with hair, embroidery needles, dimensions variable, 2019

Each small garlic skin sculpture is stitched with strands of hair and pinned to the wall with the needle. The work wavers and gently spins with the shifting air currents in the room, or in response to the viewer’s breath. Titled Still it prompts the question; Where here is the stillness found?

2022

Linen handkerchief embroidered with hair, 27cm x 27cm

Feral cat trees can be found around Australia. Folk hang the dead creatures from branches, a gruesome monument to the devastation caused by invasive species. This work uses strands of hair stitched onto an antique linen handkerchief. It references a practice whereby the colonises of Australia traveled with locks of hair crafted within keepsakes from their homeland in the British Isle. It questions: Who is the invader? Who has a right to place? Who or what decides?

2016

Driftwood, vertebrae, tile

Carp gills, sheep tooth, gold thread

I perpetuate the mourning process.  This is an art utterly motivated by the lost thing.  Driven by a desire to grasp it.  To know it.  Re-name and re-form it.  The new form seeming only to bind itself to mortality, like a homing device.  And inevitably all is lost, as before.

Garlic, carpet-snake skin, kangaroo claw, sheep teeth, bumble bee, chamomile flowers, fingernail clippings, gelatine capsules, hair strands, sewing needles. 120cm, 2012

A voodoo-like assemblage of futile weapons of attack and defence: The venom-less carpet snake; the docile bumble bee; inferior claws (it is the legs of the kangaroo that do the fighting) Chamomile and garlic protect and soothe. Needles to mend.

I was farming garlic at the time this exhibition came to a close. The sculpture joined the crop.

2006

Eucalyptus caesia branch, kangaroo paw bone, poet's hair, beeswax, 30cm.

2004

Sun: Paperbark, beeswax and four varieties of chilli seed. Tree: Eucalyptus bark, twigs, paperbark, chicken wire, rose petals, beeswax, bone, gelatine capsules, chilli seeds, dried mud and dead sculpture (Ocean Song. Those who go down to the sea tell it's pearly story), installation view.


Back home

the immigrant farmer

has a new colonial girl.

She spends her days tending rose gardens
(which are multiplying like cane toads)

She shoots the little black wallaby

shouting

"They’re not native to the area

and we don't want 'em!"

2002

Dehydrated strawberries stitched with the artist's hair over an armature of sheep ribs, hair and beeswax.

"Christine's work has a medicinal quality and purpose. It has been made to ward off the fear of decay and transience as each of the materials used contains the memory of the creative process. In addition, these materials create new memories through the scents they produce. They are both the keepers and producers of memory - igniting, creating and containing them." Jacquelyn Murphy, Curator of Grapple.