Interview with Christine Gordon

Conducted 26 April 2022
By Joshua Y'Barbo

The artist discusses her inspiration in time, landscapes, Buddhism, poetry, and reflections on the past, present and future. 

'Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.'  - Andy Warhol

 Back to the Future (2021), 

by Christine Gordon, a film still from the artist's video, Passing Time, 

BA (Hons) Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art

Interview: 

Joshua Y'Barbo (JY): What do you make work about, how do you go about making your work, what do you think about when making your work?

Christine Gordon (CG): At the core of my practice is a concern with time, lived experience and spiritual meaning. My work attempts to explore my philosophical questions about transience and mortality, the difference between the materialistic experience of the world and a parallel, deeper, spiritual existence.

A primary source of inspiration is landscape, but I am also influenced by Eastern philosophies, especially Buddhism, poetry, and literary references. Poetic imagery relies on metaphor, creating a network of correspondence between things or ideas. I am interested in how this associative linking of simultaneous sensations of feelings, thoughts and memories can generate an affective response.

My sculptural and installation work attempts to capture a slice of time, expressing a simultaneous relationship between the present moment, the past and the future, a palimpsest of time, memory and place concentrated in an object or an image. 

I am interested in the idea of vertical time experienced as duration or an arrested moment, a distillation, in Baudelaire's phrase, of the eternal from the transitory.

Where my 3D work involves a layering of time and place, I often incorporate projected and reflected images as a means to combine the physical with the intangible to coalesce the virtual and actual.

 

In Buddhism, the idea of the gap is important. It represents a boundary that divides and separates, or a link, a bridge between two things. For me, the use of mirrors is a way of expressing this gap. 

The present moment is in the gap between the past, which has gone, and the future yet to arrive. We cannot capture that in-between moment, yet it is really all there is. This was the feeling, a threshold between parallel states of being, I was trying to capture with my light arch sculpture 'Bardo' and with the wing mirror images in my video 'Passing Time'.  

     

JY: How was studying and finishing your degree during the pandemic. What impact did it have on your studies and the work you make? 

CG: I relocated to the west of Ireland (where my husband was working) just before the first lockdown and concentrated on painting and video work. I largely abandoned my 3D work. I was lucky in that I could focus on the landscape around me in Galway and start exploring how I could incorporate it into my practice. Our second online term also coincided with our dissertation preparation, which is doable from home but not ideal without the benefit of a library. One of the motivating factors behind enrolling for an art degree for me was access to the college workshops and technicians and the stimulation of being with other students. I had made good use of the workshops during our first year, but our forced evacuation from Chelsea, for nearly a third of our degree course, represented a big dent in my college dream. I returned to college for our final term and crammed as much as I could into those few weeks. I tried aluminium casting for the first time then and am really sorry that I did not have time to do more of this before the course ended. 

JY: Based on your experiences, do you have any problem-solving advice for other artists and designers? 

CG: I can only repeat the advice I give myself when my confidence and resolve falter-  Just keep working! And be open to the unintended effect- sometimes, the most interesting developments occur at the margins of your practice. 

JY: What are your immediate personal and professional concerns or interests?

CG: Our lockdown experience was a good dress rehearsal for life after college, but I have found it harder than I expected to adjust to having a day job and creating the time and mental space to make work, and this has impinged on my practice.

When we were physically in college, I wanted to experiment with as many techniques and media as possible, to have that experience as a reference for the future. However, this meant dispersing my energy in different directions. Since leaving college, I thought it would be helpful to concentrate on one thing for a while, and I am focussing on painting. I've always loved it, particularly the idea of immersion in colour, but I've never given it the space to develop. I also want to scale up my work, to work on a large scale, but the pieces I deem most effective remain stubbornly small. 

How to invest my work with the philosophical preoccupations I am concerned with remains a challenge! The process of yin and yang, the idea that everything contains its opposite thing, life and death, presence and absence, of things in the process of becoming and dissolving back into themselves, is reflected in my watercolour work.

I am currently interested in the idea of a landscape for meditation composed of dissolving forms, and symbols, particularly the sun as a symbol of life and resurrection. 

Social Media & Website: 

https://www.instagram.com/christine.gordon.313/
https://christinegordon.net/