login    password    artist  buyer  gallery  
Not a member? Register
absolutearts.com logo HOME REGISTER BUY ART SEARCH ART TRENDS COLLECT ART ART NEWS
 
 
Indepth Arts News:

"Christine Borland: A Major Exhibition of Work"
2006-12-02 until 2007-01-28
Fruitmarket Gallery
Edinburgh, , UK United Kingdom

The Fruitmarket Gallery is delighted to announce a major exhibition of work by Christine Borland. This exhibition brings together a selection of existing, recent, and newly commissioned work,offering an opportunity to trace the development of Borland�s ideas across the range of her practice. Christine Borland makes art which deals with the body, and with our emotional, imaginative, medical and historical sense of self. Her practice is hugely varied, yet it is united by a number of constants. Chief among these is an insistent interrogation of objects and situations which shed light on the junction between the fact of the body and the more imaginative or conceptual construct of the self: the mechanics and the mystery of human existence.

The kind of objects with which Borland works tend to be those with a close practical, imaginative or symbolic relationship to the human body. Shoes, blankets, slippers, crockery, bones and cell cultures have all featured in her work, as have objects with more elliptical associations, such as diamonds, birds, guns, apples, watermelons, leaves, plants and trees.

Borlands exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery opens with a series of sculptures examining the frailty of the human condition through the fragility of the human body. In the mid 1990s, Borland discovered that it was possible to purchase human skeletons mail order. Simultaneously fascinated and horrified by this, she made a number of works which seek to honour and recuperate the lost souls whose skeletal remains were acquired through the post. Second Class Male, Second Class Female, 1996 reconstructs in bronze the heads of the last two skulls obtained by the suppliers which the artist used; while Supported, 1990-1999, reclaims a fragile image from a skeleton by tracing its outline in dust on a glass shelf. These works are presented in the context of several others, including Bullet Proof Breath, 2001, a glass representation of human bronchia wound around with spider silk, which offer alternative ways of depicting and imagining the human body.

A sense of human knowledge unites the new work in the exhibition, which takes the natural world as its point of origin. The apple tree that provided Isaac Newton with his revelatory moment, and the plane tree on the island of Kos, under which Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, is said to have taught, reverberate through the history of mans understanding of his place in the world. Borland has worked directly with both trees to make new sculptures for the exhibition, though neither is represented in its actual form. Accentuating the imaginative power of these trees, their position as the natural guardians of human endeavour, Borland summons only their symbolic presence.

Ultimately, Christine Borlands art is concerned with re-visualising that which is no longer there. Finding ways imaginatively to cross back over the line dividing the body from the self - the specimen from the individual - she seeks to recuperate something of the essence of human life.


Related Links:


YOUR FIRST STOP FOR ART ONLINE!
HELP MEDIA KIT SERVICES CONTACT


Discover over 150,000 works of contemporary art. Search by medium, subject matter, price and theme... research over 200,000 works by over 22,000 masters in the indepth art history section. Browse through new Art Blogs. Use our advanced artwork search interface.

Call for Artists, Premiere Portfolio sign-up for your Free Portfolio or create an Artist Portfolio today and sell your art at the marketplace for contemporary Art! Start a Gallery Site to exclusively showcase your gallery. Keep track of contemporary art with your free MYabsolutearts account.

 


Copyright 1995-2013. World Wide Arts Resources Corporation. All rights reserved