Sculptor Christine Prescott Follows Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Frida Kahlo

Christine Prescott is a maker of unusual things. The Australian sculptor mines her internal realms to create poetic forms that speak of essential emotional terrain. Utilising organic materials such as dried fruits and vegetables, wine, bones, hair and wood, her delicate assemblages, photographs, drawings and paintings are deeply personal and speak immediately to the viewer.

Like those before her— Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta and Fiona Hall—Prescott combines anecdotal declarations of enchantment and dispossession with intricately constructed material medleys that emerge like votive invocations inviting her audience into her unique world.

She refers to her own practice as “Ritual, fact and mutterings… the mutterings of things that do not exist or only exist elsewhere."

“I relocate the lost thing and go to the trouble of renaming it, only to have to lose it again,” she tells me.

Prescott acts like an interpreter in Skin of Brown Snake III, where she transmogrifies the seductive shimmering surface of the brown snake, a memory her childhood growing up on a station in the Queensland outback, into a painstaking ephemeral drawing made from wine and paper that—like skin of the brown snake—changes over time.

Her visions of past, present and future coalesce into magical incarnations merging carefully selected materials that speak an aesthetic language cultivated by Prescott’s practice, which has spanned over a decade. In Sun Bleached Bones Baked with Heat, a stem of ghostly white eucalyptus gums peak into a dried kangaroo paw bound with bee’s wax and the hair of a poet.

"They are fetish objects imbued by the spirit of the materials they have been crafted from. Each with its own inherent power, language and history," she declares.

She draws from the natural world and mimics its processes in her work, reworking materials such as garlic skins sutured together with human hair into a baby cradle. The skins behave like the peeling skin of paper barks trees. Her practice is indicative of place, evoking the ebb and flow of the natural world—a constant palette and inspiration for her dreamlike work.

Things of the Dirt (Tree) is an impressive sculpture, growing like a tree in the gallery space. Upon closer inspection, the work is embedded with captivating details constructed of eucalyptus bark, human, hair beeswax, gelatin capsules, sheep ribs, chicken wire and strawberries. It is a love song to home, a yearning for the arid dry regions of the artist’s memories. She delves into an investigation of who has a right to be in these territories, what is feral and what is native.

Ocean Song (Those Who Go Down to the Sea Tell Its Pearly Story) is a carcass-like form, sheep’s ribs creating an interior skeleton bonded with human hair and beeswax, over which a veil of dried strawberries sewn together with human hair forms a canopy.

Prescott’s installations hark of something dead and simultaneously imbued with subtle murmurs of life, and she delights in this tension between the two.

"I perpetuate the mourning process,” she says. “This is an art utterly motivated by the lost thing. Driven by the desire to grasp it, to know it. The new form seeming only to bind itself to mortality, like a homing device.

Prescott is a compelling Australian artist, and her work resonates poignantly with the now—human beings are starting to feel the real impacts of a changing climate, and Prescott’s work inhabits and speaks of the very delicate vulnerable balance between man and nature.

In The Cure and the Cause, the artist brings together a lone dried strawberry placed neatly on a piece of driftwood retrieved from the Irish coastline, vivid and powerful in its simplicity. One object slowly retreats, yet the other emerges from the rapturous ocean, reconfigured and re shaped by the tumultuous elements from it’s previous form.

She brings to the fore the voice that nature is unable to articulate, and the deeply entwined relationship between humans and animals informed by their environment that has been diminished by capitalism and the industrial age.

In Things of the Dirt (Sun) Prescott creates a map of the Murray Darling Basin, an impression of the river system which begins in Queensland and completes its journey in Victoria. The precision-laid chilli seeds decorate the paper dome’s surface and echo the aerial view of the elaborate and vital river system.

"It holds a frightened beauty still capable of sustaining hope," she says.

Prescott’s practice is ethereal, illusory and dreamlike, weaving together the depths of the subconscious realms with poetic observances of nature into inspiring convergences never seen before.

You can find out more about Christine Prescott here.

Christian Thompson is an artist and the inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholar at University of Oxford. 

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