Elemental & Accessible
I’ve made larger than life pieces and at the same time I’ve always made very small and intimate pieces which were more like fleeting thoughts, but which may have had a big idea behind them . . . as my art education evolved and my interest in things grew beyond just working with clay . . . I was working more with ideas than with just making product.
Christine Boswijk, 20201
Moving reflectively through the exhibition space of Christine Boswijk: Thinking Through My Hands offered a fresh experience of major work.
Breathing life into clay is a metaphor that this artist has referred to throughout her career. As she states in her foreword to the show’s catalogue, she would ‘breathe life into it, fire it, and my thoughts would become things, as if diaries in time and an understanding would evolve’.2 Many cultures embrace ancient myths that explain human origins as deriving from clay.3 For Boswijk, such a metaphor hums gently in the background of everything that she does.
A further idea is expressed on her website: ‘The main concern in my work is that which goes beyond form and space—rather more the Poetics of space.’ Boswijk is referring here to Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 , referencing lived experience of space and the context of this in nature—sensation,
