Christine Borland

Christine Borland's works sculpture, printmaking and photography and with a variety of materials including glass, china, fabric and bronze. She often asks us to consider the fragility of human life and the way in which it is valued by social systems and institutions.[7] Borland's practice highlights the depersonalisation of an individual's identity in Modern medical practices, and her work attempts to regain physicality and identity.[8] Borland questions how we identify scientific fact, objectivity and truth together with traditional, conventional forms of art material, such as bronze or ceramics, together with new technologies.[9]

Borland's work, From Life, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 She started with the skeleton of a missing person that she purchased legally from a medical supplies company and received it in the post, and then worked with medicine, forensics, judicial and police institutions to obtain information about the person. The end product was an exhibition of the skeleton, a bronze cast of the head using facial reconstruction.[10] It was an attempt to reclaim the individual identity of the skeleton, and to turn an objective object into an understood, specific human.

In November 1996, at the Sean Kelly Gallery, she presented the work "Second Class Male, Second Class Female" (a second-class man, a second-class woman), in which she reconstructed the heads of two people.

LHomme Double was first exhibited in 1997. Borland asked 6 different academically-trained artists to make a clay portraitbust of the notorious Nazi War criminal, Josef Mengele, otherwise known as the Angel of Death. Borland obtained two grainy black-and-white portrait photographs and a short description of Mengele's physical appearance from Auschwitz survivors.[11] This same information was provided to the 6 artists and was used to create portraitbusts.[12] The portrait busts are all different, each presented on a simple wooden frame as if straight from the artist's studio. Each is made of clay and left unfired, emphasising the overall lack of certainty and finality. When seen together, the six portraits do not provide a clear, recognisable, singular identity, but a number of possibilities.

The Dead Teach the Living (1997), originally displayed at the 1997 Munster Sculpture Project in Germany, was a group of computer-reconstructed heads cast in white plaster that show different racial stereotypes.

After a True Story—Giant and Fairy Tales (1997) showed a negative impression of the skeletal remains of an 18th-century dwarf and contrasted them with a 19th-century giant. Phantom Twins (1997), consisted of leather "dolls" containing real foetal skeletons.

• Second Class Male, Second Class Female, November 1996
• L'Homme Double, 1997, Lisson Gallery
• The Dead Teach the Living, 1997, Skulpture Projekte Münster, Münster Germany
• Solo exhibitions include the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), Dundee Contemporary Arts, De Appel (Amsterdam), Fundação Serralves (Lisbon), Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich) and Cast From Nature, Camden Arts Centre (London).
• In 2015 she collaborated with Brody Condon on Circles of Focus, presented at CCA Glasgow.

• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh[13]
• Tate Gallery, London[14]

• British Art

• Christine Borland - Artist Website
• Designer Bodies
• Video of the artist creating and preparing works for the Camden Arts Centre exhibition "Cast from Nature" May–July 2011{link}
• Christine Borland at Artist Pension Trust