artist statement
“I live with my family in an old 1790s farmhouse in Cape Elizabeth, Maine where the landscape is as fertile as my imagination. The salt marsh is close enough to smell when the tide is low. The meadows are plentiful and boast goldenrod and loosestrife at the end of summer. Elder crabapple trees flower in cloudlike abundance every spring alongside swaths of wild yellow forsythia and blue lupine. Egrets, ibises, and red winged blackbirds are our neighbors, and field mice make their homes in our stacks of wood. The cold winter sea still nudges the yellow seaweed with the tide. These are the things I notice.
This body of work channels the wonder that has surrounded me since we moved to Maine in 2019. We removed a crumbling barn soon after we arrived and are now in the process of rebuilding it so that I can walk across the driveway to listen to the world and make work in a wide-open space surrounded by this natural landscape that calls my attention. For four years, I have walked around the old barn foundation and watched it change with the seasons. I have mapped the light as it turns with the tide, highlighting the meadow that grows tall with native plants. My Kaleidoscope installations, Dichotomous Air In Color sculptures, kinetic Light Totems, and newest Iridian Mist sculptures reference light and color inspired by my time listening to the land. Oftentimes, my children are nearby listening in their own ways and teaching me what they know; themes of childhood and playfulness show up in my work in a myriad of ways. I have them to thank for that.
Writing has become a prominent part of my creative practice since moving to Maine; so much that in the fall of 2022, I compiled a series of personal essays and poetry and had them printed into a limited-edition letterpress artist book titled Small, Significant Things. Each book comes paired with a bronze small, significant thing I collected as I sat in fields, beaches, and meadows near my home. The installations and sculptures in this show explore the same subjects that compelled me to write—the landscape, the seascape, the sky, and the changing rhythms outside of my window. My studio practice is equal parts immersing myself in nature and then exploring it in my work. The title of this show is a reference to my favorite poet, Mary Oliver, who understood more than anyone that everything becomes illuminated when we are Listening To The World.”
about the artist
has spent her lifetime loving and wondering about the world and uses the simple delight of experiencing nature fully to create layers of meaning in space. All of her work is based heavily in process, using her body in a repeated creative gesture to make work that discusses light and joy and the interplay between the two.
In her most recent Light Totem series, she works with a natural material—mica— to create kinetic sculptures of reflected light and colored shadow. The work pushes the boundaries of simple sculpture because each Totem is kinetic; the expression is not limited to the wall on which it resides. Instead, the light found in any suspended space moves around the room creating a changed place and a purpose in the moment.
In her long-standing Murmuration series, Christina works with porcelain and forms pools of light with her hands. Each piece passes through the artist’s hands at least five times before finding a final home on a wall. Throughout any given day, light in the room moves across the work and casts subtle shadows behind the pieces.
No matter what, site-specific installation art changes the essence of a given space more than any other art form, and that is where Christina finds a home.
