Christine Borland, English Family China, 1998, ceramic, glass and wood
Collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
This survey show of Scottish artist Christine Borland will present new works amongst the old. So viewers will get a chance to see well-known works like Bullet Proof Breath (2001), a hand-blown glass representation of human bronchia, and Supported (1995), a glass shelf on which the outline of a human spine has been exactly traced in dust. In works of great beauty, Borland interrogates our collective emotional, imaginative, medical and historical senses of self.
Christine Borland, Twin, hand-made, child-birth demonstration model
1997, leather, plastic skull, sawdust, Collection of the National Galleries of Scotland
Borland is principally concerned with objects and situations which shed light on the fragile relation between the body and the self, but more generally she has something of the scientist's curiosity toward the physical world about her, adopting an almost forensic approach toward the world of things. For instance, Second Class Male/Second Class Female, 1996, reconstructs from human skulls obtained by mail order the likenesses of the two people to whom the skulls belonged. Crafted by osteologists and an anatomical sculptor, the process mimics that used by the police to determine the identity of long-dead crime victims. Two new works on display take famous trees in the history of science as their starting point, namely those of Sir Isaac Newton and Hippocrates.
Christine Borland
2 December 2006 - 28 January 2007
Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street
Edinburgh, EH1 1DF
Tel: +44 (0) 131 225 2383
www.fruitmarket.co.uk
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