CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Christine Willcocks

As an artist Christine Willcock combines a range of printmaking, installation and photographic processes to explore notions of museology 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 preservation.

Willcocks was the 2014 recipient of the highly sought after Studio Residency at the Paris Cite, facilitated by the Australia Council. She has been the winner of the Wilson Visual Art Award 2012, The Fremantle Print Award 2007 and The Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award 2000 as well as being a finalist in The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize 2008 (Highly Commended) and the Conrad Jupiters Art Prize 2006. Willcocks is represented in numerous major Australian collections, including Artbank, Print Council of Australia, and Queensland State Library. She has been aquired by The Fremantle Print Award 2007 and The Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award 2000 & 2014.

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

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

CATALOGUE ESSAYS
Souvenir, by Phe Luxford 2015

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Wild Rocks & Tamed Pathways

Past Exhibitions

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Asplenium Baileyanum 2013
drypoint etching from cardboard, Artist's Proof
120cm x 60cm unframed
$1,100 AUD

Cyclosorus Dentatus 2013
drypoint etching from cardboard, Artist's Proof, 2 available
120cm x 60cm unframed
$1,100 AUD

Pteridomania 2012
drypoint etching from cardboard, Artist's Proof
40cm x 60cm unframed
$550 AUD

Butterflies 2013
drypoint etching from cardboard, Artist's Proof
38cm x 54cm unframed
$550 AUD

Razor Grinder-the cicada (open winged) #2 2012
dry point etching, ink and wax on paper, edition 2 of 6
33cm x 94cm
$1,100 AUD