Christine Borland

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Christine Borland was born in Darvel, Ayrshire in 1965 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Ulster in Belfast. is a one of the Young British Artists (YBAs). Borland's work asks the viewer to consider the ways in which social systems and institutions exploit and devalue life. Her installations explore mortality and exert a morbid fascination in their ability to simultaneously seduce and repel. This is in part due to the fact that the methods and materials she chooses for her art (such as spider-dragline filament, bone china, bronze and glass) contrast with the gravity of the issues she addresses, including genetics, medical ethics and the nature of individual identity. At the core of Borland's practice is a powerful debate about the underlying assumptions that guide scientific research, and her use of epidemiological procedures has resulted in sustained collaborations with institutions such as the Medical Research Council’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit.

She works with forensic science and medicine, including police and judicial processes and collaborations with the Medical Research Council’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at Glasgow University. She has said, "The heart of what I am trying to discuss is very dark, very strong and passionate, and if you can reach that through quite a rational process, I think it becomes more powerful, and importantly, more powerful to the viewer."

Christine Borland's work is associated with the systems and processes that provide the basis of our society. She has worked with police and judicial processes, forensic science and medicine, exploring the ambiguous relationship between art and science.
Borland's work is at once repulsive and seductive. She builds up layers of psychological complexity, juxtaposing the incongruous elements which pervade human sensibility, offending our notions of correctness and questioning the validity

of our ideals. She plays with concepts of life and death, masculine and feminine, absence and presence, innocence and guilt.
Through her investigative processes she reveals the brutal realities of contemporary society and validates her discourse with historical 'evidence', providing a disturbing commentary on humanity. She invokes in the viewer an automatic tendency towards inquisitiveness, a fascination with her subject matter and tools, because of their proximity to our own body. They hide a morbid fascination from which the viewer recoils instinctively but cannot escape.

For Hygiene she presents This Being You Must Create (Spy in the Anatomy Museum) for the first time in the UK. This is an installation of eighty small images, developed from slides taken with a spy camera while pretending to draw in the Anatomy Museum of Montpellier in 1997. The work refers to anatomy and natural history collections, and the 'wunderkamers' so popular in the 19th century. The definition of types is explored through this collection of norms and monstrosities and suggests a precursor to the contemporary enthusiasm for identifying type through genetic monitoring.
The installation Simulated Patient is based on role-play situations where medical students practice dealing with a range of difficult scenarios, many of which involve breaking bad news to patients. These 'patients', played by professional actors, undergo 'consultations', which take place in small 'surgeries' filmed on closed circuit TV and relayed to a classroom next door. Borland has the same actress play all the different 'patient' roles, some of them written by the artist, while various students play themselves as the 'doctors'. The presentation of this work deflects the viewer's voyeurism by concentrating on the 'use of silence' in the consultations. The viewer finds her/himself empathising with difficult position of the doctor as well as the tragic circumstances of the patient. Relief is also experienced in that the 'worst case' scenario unfolding is under controlled but convincing circumstances.

In Home Testing, Borland presents a more sculpturally formal series of games whereby we are informed of a series of probability statistics and invited to use the custom-made dice and receptacles to put them to the test. The statistics are all related to pregnancy and present a scenario that anyone expecting a baby now faces upon stepping into the medical arena. Recent developments in genetics have meant an increased knowledge of risk and a subsequent range of choices and dilemmas, which are likely to widen and escalate in the future. Home Testing is an attempt at empowerment by providing simple, hands-on means to translate baffling statistics into something personal.

"The heart of what I am trying to discuss is very dark, very strong and passionate, and if you can reach that through quite a rational process, I think it becomes more powerful, and, importantly, more personal to the viewer."
The six artworks assembled for this exhibition present an overview of Scottish artist Borland's work from 1994 to 2001. Characterized by a formal, ethereal beauty, Spirit Collection: Hippocrates (1999) is composed of almost one hundred drop-shaped vessels containing a leaf reduced to a skeletal form by bleach. The leaves, suspended in a clear preservative solution, are from a tree Christine Borland happened to notice while visiting the Department of Medical Genetics at Glasgow University. The tree was grown from seeds of the Plane Tree of Hippocrates in Kos, Greece, where it is said that Hippocrates taught his students. In modernized form the Hippocratic oath remains an expression of ideal conduct for Western physicians, and it is the ethical terrain of medical research that Borland explores.
The Set Conversation Pieces (1998) are cast from obstetrical models in English bone china, which incorporates bone ash. Cradled in each pelvis, a fetal skull sits in a variety of childbirth positions. The patterns are Borland's adaptations of English patterns modelled on Chinese designs for the English market. Desirable in a markedly different way, spider silk, is used in Bullet Proof Breath (2001), a glass bronchial tree with spider-silk wrapped branches. Though it appears fragile, spider silk has a tensile strength greater than that of steel, and is being developed for potential use in ballistic-protection garments. Scientists continue to seek a way to mass-produce the filament.
‘The Quickening, The Lightening, The Crowning' by Christine Borland.

This image is part of an installation that was exhibited in Warning Shots in 2002. It included handguns, and leather-covered anatomical models of pelvises and the skulls of infants used to instruct medical students on childbirth. These were commissioned by Royal Armouries for the exhibition.
The image shown is a photograph of the artist, shooting while pregnant which was exhibited with a soundtrack of a foetal heartbeat, interrupted by bursts of gun fire.

Spirit Collection (1999). Numerous vaccum-sealed teardrop-shaped glass containers hang overhead, each filled with a combination of ethyl alcohol, preservative and water, and each containing a leaf. The leaves themselves look unreal, for Borland has bleached them white in the manner of makers of Victorian bell jar curios. But they are very real.

When the artist was working with geneticists at the University of Glasgow, she saw a tree outside the window of the Genetics department -- an undistinguished tree, in a not very prime spot over by the car park. She was told that the tree was grown from the seed of a Plane tree in Kos, Greece, under which Hippocrates, the father of medicine, first taught his students. While the locals knew little of the circumstances of the Glasgow seedling (more information was proffered after Borland's exhibition of Spirit Collection last year in Dundee, Scotland), Hippocrates' original tree is a famous, revered, ancient monstrosity, propped up on all sides -- a place of pilgrimage.

Borland harvested some leaves from the tree, and here they are. The leaves are preserved to emphasize their piece-of-the-true-cross "sanctity" as actual genetic material. Cherishing their origin, Borland defies the culture of cloning. But Borland's presentation of the leaves of a tree's "family tree" -- white, weird, spooky, afloat in the solution in a Frankenstein way -- also suggests that she fears that originals are being rendered ghostly in the age of the clone. The piece functions then as a sort of "burning bush," which fills the mind with all sorts of questions about the ambiguities of life after DNA research.

Christine Borland makes art which deals with the body, and with our emotional, imaginative, medical and historical sense of self. Her practice is hugely varied, yet it is united by a number of constants. Chief among these is an insistent interrogation of objects and situations which shed light on the junction between the fact of the body and the more imaginative or conceptual construct of the self: the mechanics and the mystery of human existence.

Christine-Borland-british-artist-brit-artists-britart-image-paintings

Young British Artists or YBAs also Brit artists and Britart a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Christine Borland

Clean Oil Paintings

The procedure is as follows:

1. Buy a loaf (two or three loaves if the painting is large) of a good doughy bread--a large sourdough works nicely.
2. On a pretty day, take the painting outdoors--or work inside on a large drop cloth--since this is a messy procedure.
3. Using dough pulled from the inside of the loaf, scrub the painting using gentle pressure. You will see the soil collect on the dough. Get a new hunk of dough as the older piece gets dirty or disintegrates. Continue this process over the entire surface of the work.
4. Using a soft bristle brush-- such as a good quality house painting brush--brush the remaining dough crumbs off the painting. Go methodically over the entire surface because the dough likes to stick and any remaining crumbs would be an enticement to insects.

Paintings on Artist Board, is probably no more than 50 or 60 years old. Protecting paintings with a layer of varnish has not been standard practice in the latter half of this century, this further suggests that your painting doesn't have a build up of varnish, oil residues and imbedded grime that would require using a solvent. (Alcohol and cotton swabs work well on such oils and some varnishes, but please don't try this on the family Vermeer.)
Your biggest concern before undertaking any surface cleaning would be the actual quality of the paint's adherence to the artist board. If the paint is flaking or if the impasto (paint layer) is very thick and raised from the surface, you probably should just leave the piece as is. If the surface appears stable, intact and relatively flat, you might try the following approach:
Remember: patience and a light touch are required.
Dust the piece--ever so gently--with a very soft brush. (Imagine you are cleaning a soiled rose bloom from the garden.) Next, prepare a mild soap solution (dishwashing liquid works well) and clean, soft rags. Using a very gentle blotting motion, clean off surface oil and grime build-up. Work in small areas. At no time should the painting's surface be allowed to become saturated with the soap solution. And for heaven's sake, don't rub. Let this dry. If progress has been made, but it doesn't yet meet your standards of clean. You may repeat this process--once.

Other caveats: Do not submerge the painting in water. Its backing could warp and possibly dissolve. In fact, the less water you use on this painting, the better.
There are no guarantees here: If the artist did not take proper steps in preparing the board, then you may find paint starting to flake off. The main reason why older paintings have varnish build-up is from previous efforts to counter this effect. Also, if you have mistaken gouache, watercolour or any other readily soluble medium for oil paint, this cleaning process will almost certainly destroy the work.
And a closing word of advice: the reason some people choose watch repair as a hobby is they lack the patience to do art restoration.
At a car boot sale, I found a wonderful old drawing. But it's rather dirty and perhaps has had some water dripped on it. What is the best way to clean it?
It is for good reason that the value of an artwork on paper--be it a drawing, a watercolour or a print--is closely linked to its condition: works on paper are very difficult, sometimes impossible, to clean or restore.
Perhaps, a kneaded eraser could be used to carefully remove a small blemish or bit of grime. Otherwise, simply smooth the drawing with the assistance of a mat and enjoy it "as is".

Good luck with your spring cleaning!