CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Christine Willcocks

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Christine Willcocks combines a range of printmaking, installation and photographic processes to explore notions of museology and the natural world, and the conceptual spaces such environments evoke in the viewer. Employing a range of display devices such as vitrines, domes and antique frames to house contemporary works, the artist highlights the passage of museological traditions and our relationships to concepts of preservation, both social and environmental.

Over the past years my work has focused on the demise of the natural world and its renewal, often as objects or artifacts within an institutional setting. My prints 'Bird Skins' initiated an exploration of the rituals of collecting and how this act plays a key role in the preservation of our memories. My fascination is not just with collections but also with the psychology of display. How the vitrine actually relates to the object, what they reveal about the work of constructing and reconstructing history. While my work takes in cross disciplines such as drawing, photography and 3D, it is the printmaking that is the backbone of my practise. I wish to expand the possibilities of drypoint etching from cardboard, a process that suits a non-toxic environment.
Artists Statement - Christine Willcocks

Willcocks's work evokes visual beauty in a troubled landscape. The artist successfully translates to paper the beauty, quiet and meditative stillness of objects that no longer have life. She responds to a transient space which hovers between life and death. The addition of delicate etched glass museum domes raises questions about our need to collect things. Willcock's silent, lifeless birds and trees are presented as scientific artifacts - as tools for research - but they also suggest that our rituals of collecting are attempts to retain a physical connection to all things lost.
Susi Muddiman, Director, Tweed River Gallery

ARTIST PROFILE:
Christine Willcocks has been a finalist in the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2024), Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Art (2023), the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2020, 2016, 2014 acquired) and the Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize (2020). In 2015 she was acquired by the Kedumba Drawing Award and was a finalist (acquired) for the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award. In 2014 she was the recipient of the highly sought after Studio Residency at the Paris Cite, facilitated through the Australia Council. Since 2013 she has held the position of Co-Director and lecturer at the Byron School or Art in Byron Bay. Willcocks is represented in numerous major Australian collections including Artbank,The Print Council of Australia, State Library of Queensland, The State Library of Victoria, Queensland University of Technology and Southern Cross University.

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Kiss the Ground 2025
acrylic on board
150cm x 105cm
$4,900 AUD

Portrait of a Rock II 2024
acrylic on canvas
91cm x 101cm
$4,500 AUD

Broken Heart 2025
acrylic on board
75cm x 60cm
Reserved

Breath 2025
various found object
36cm x 36cm x 34cm
$1,100 AUD

Yellow 2024
photo transfer, acrylic on Arches cotton rag paper
20cm x 20cm
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