Christine Halsey is a multi-media artist working in areas of sculpture, assemblage, print, and video. With an instinctive and emotional response to material and form, her practice prioritises processes of making and is often site responsive, using architectural and contextual characteristics of a space to inform and adapt her work.
Addressing themes of contradiction and ambiguity, Halsey’s work explores ‘the in-between’; the liminal spaces on the threshold of opposing extremes where our understanding of a thing shifts and mutates. Usually it is the complexities inherent in human relationships which fuel her work; much of the work starts with ready-made objects, incorporating processes of deconstruction, damage or repair as metaphor for psychological power dynamics.
The site-responsive assemblage featured in Ones to Watch 2024 draws on the gallery’s historical relation to the textile industry by using thread, fabric, and processes of folding, stacking and mending. The piece aims to explore loose overlapping narratives of creation and destruction, care and conflict, control, and subjugation in the context of female experience. This installation comprises an assemblage of deconstructed domestic furniture and piles of hard and soft materials all connected to the making of a home. Stacks of clean, neatly folded laundry are crushed or soiled by dirty and heavy building materials or skewered by steel reinforcing bar, alluding to the metaphorical space where acts of care, neglect and violence overlap and mutate.
