A Short Memorial to a Woman Whose Work Shaped Me
Today I’m waking to the news that artist Christine Borland has died.
We’ve lost one of our finest.
Her work changed my world in the 90s.
When I first found her, she was the sensitive echo sculptor in the YBA (Young British Artists) scene: less noisy than her peers (who stirred and rode the waves of indignant media like it was their job – and in some ways, it has become an artist’s job ever since).
Her work demanded silence.
If you were there for the noise, you would find pause.
If you were there for art, you would find majesty.
She didn’t need to provoke to be clever. She elevated.
My output in my final year at art school was filled with a way of seeing and thinking that traced back to her work.
I collected dust from a gravestone engraver, recorded the sounds of abandoned buildings and cleaned the stoop of houses left crumbling in the landscape by the Clearances.
Memorials are a theme I come back to over and over in art, and her work shows me ways of caring and ways of exploring the past.
In a world racing forward at a quite sickening pace, this morning, I feel we have lost one more invitation to pause deeply.
One more chance to recover.
About Slowing Down
You may know me for writing about language and travel, but art and the living environment are my background and my ways of being in this world.
Sharing them sensitively and well is how I help.
When I have a language guest, inside my head I am asking:
Would this thing help somebody pay attention?
Does it reveal something they’d normally pass?
Does it introduce someone/something worth meeting properly?
Does it celebrate being here? (rather than being another place to visit)?
The work of Christine Borland has become part of my sensitivities.
As artists, we absorb the way others see things.
As artists, we can share them.
I still work to support Scottish contemporary artists, including through Blue Noun, and I am training myself to speak for the land.
My travel and language offer is to step into this and join me.
