Prof Christine Borland

Biography

In 1994 Christine Borland purchased a female, human skeleton as the starting point for her solo exhibition in Glasgow's Tramway From Life, since then her work has explored our physical and psychological sense of self in relation to society’s institutions; of science, medicine, museology and academia.

By introducing the imaginary to these arenas, her works engender a new aesthetic relationship with the subject matter and makes visible people and practices, usually inaccessible to a general public.

Borland’s career as an exhibiting artist spans the last the last 25 years; rising to prominence at the Aperto 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, Borland was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 and has subsequently exhibited in most of the art world’s most prestigious exhibitions. Works are held in museum collections nationally and internationally including Tate, London and Migros Museum, Zurich and several permanent works sited in the UK, at Whitworth Park, Manchester and in the grounds of Glasgow University.

Recent works and exhibitions include: Positive Pattern (2017) commissioned by the Institute for Human Transplantation, Newcastle; developed in close collaboration with staff and donor families, the group of sculptures explore the idea of making visible an unseen presence through representation, in positive form, of the negative voids inside 5 Barbara Hepworth sculptures. Editions of the work have subsequently been exhibited at SNGMA, Edinburgh (2017) Beaux Arts (ENSBA) in Paris, 2019 and at the Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2020)

Recent collaborative projects with artist, Brody Condon are an on-going exploration of death and society, exhibitions include; Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen a large-scale sculpture sited in a semi-derelict 19th Century watchtower in the city’s New Calton Burial Ground for Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2013, Circles of Focus CCA Glasgow, 2015 & The Fall Experiment, Stroom Den Haag, 2017. The latter explore through practice-based research, whether body donation could be a means of artistic as well as scientific research.

Borland has recently completed 2 major commissions, which used collections and archives relating to WW1 as the basis for extensive research. At Glasgow Museums (in collaboration with 14/18NOW and the Art Fund) Borland developed a large-scale sculptural work, I Say Nothing that responded to the intangible histories reflected in collection objects. Installed in Kelvingrove Museum, the final work emerged from a series of participatory workshops that brought together artists, curators, conservators, students and academics, around the performative re-activation of items retrieved from storage. To the Power of Twelve at the 19th Century neo-Gothic mansion, Mount Stuart, similarly explored conflict-related objects to shape collective cultural memory and help recover hidden histories.

From 2012 – 2016 Borland was the first BALTIC (BxNU) Professor, initiating a new focus on cross-disciplinary research and practice with a series of collaborative events held at BALTIC and BALTIC 39 . Borland is a founder member of the research group The Cultural Negotiation of Science