Christine Borland to Show at The Fruitmarket Gallery

Monday, 16 October 2006 13:47

Edinburgh, Scotland - The Fruitmarket Gallery is delighted to announce a major exhibition of work by Christine Borland. Borland, an artist who works with the body, and with our emotional, imaginative, medical and forensic sense of self is one of Scotland’s most important artists.  Trained at Glasgow School of Art and part of the generation that includes Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling and Roderick Buchanan, she has shown all round the world, was included in Sculpture Projects Munster and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997.  On exhibit 2 December 2006 – 28 January 2007.

Her art often involves specialists in the fields of science and medicine, Borland collaborating with them to bring unfamiliar material and ideas into the realm of art. Her work is concerned with process, with what has been termed ‘the poetry of effect’, and much of her practice brings life and death together, insistently probing the fragile junction between the two.

Borland’s 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.  Her practice is hugely varied – she makes sculpture, installations, photographs and films – yet it is united by a number of constants.  Chief among these is an insistent interrogation of objects and situations which may shed light on the often fragile junction between the body and the self, the mechanics and the magic of human existence.  Borland’s process is marked by exhaustive research.  She approaches an object or an idea as might a scientist testing a hypothesis, and often enlists the help of specialists to help her do it.  She has worked with the police, with ballistics experts, with medical and forensic scientists, geneticists, botanists, osteologists, and has insinuated herself and her concerns into a number of medical, scientific and research institutions.

Bullet Proof Breath, 2001, is a hand-blown glass representation of human bronchia, the branches of the lungs through which we breathe.  Several of the most prominent bronchia have been wrapped with the delicate golden silk extracted by scientists from a nephila or golden orb weaving spider.  The silk decorates and also threatens to destroy the brittle-branches, and the sculpture evokes both living and dying.

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 honor and recuperate the lost souls whose skeletal remains may be sent through the post.  Second Class Male/Second Class Female, 1996 reconstructs in bronze the heads of the last two skulls obtained by the suppliers with which the artist worked.  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 sculptures complete the exhibition.  Over the staircase hang apples preserved in glass vessels.  The apples have been picked from the branches of Isaac Newton’s apple tree in Lincoln.  Newton’s apple tree is joined, in spirit, by Hippocrates’ plane tree.  This tree was the subject of the artist’s 1999 work Spirit Collection, 1999, in which leaves from a descendent of this tree were picked and preserved.  For The Fruitmarket Gallery, the artist is making a new work which reproduces the supports – ancient and modern - which have down the centuries been used to prop up the enormous plane tree under which Hippocrates is said to have first taught medicine in the 5^th Century B.C.

The image of the tree has been used as a metaphor for human life for centuries, including Darwin's early speculations on evolution, which suggested that 'organized beings represent a tree, irregularly branched' (1837).  Hippocrates’s tree, on the Greek island of Kos, is in an extremely fragile condition; its main trunk is split into many subsidiaries, most of which are hollow.  Borland’s recreation of the intricate system of supports which have sustained the tree for many hundreds of years, has an inherent visual cohesion and strength, highlighting our dependency on the visual and the power of beauty.  However, as a stand in for a natural form, the work ultimately serves to remind us of our inadequacies.

Visit The Fruitmarket Gallery at www.fruitmarket.co.uk/