CHRISTINE WILLCOCKS

Willcocks has been a finalist in the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2016, 2014 and winner of the award in 2000), winner of the Kedumba Drawing Award in 2015, and finalist in the Fremantle Arts Center Print Award in 2016. In 2014 she was the recipient of the highly sought after Studio Residency at the Paris Cite, facilitated through the Australia Council. Since 2013 she has held the position of Co-Director and lecturer at the Byron School or Art in Byron Bay. Willcocks is represented in numerous major Australian collections including Artbank, The Print Council of Australia, State Library of Queensland, The State Library of Victoria, Queensland University of Technology and Southern Cross University.

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 practice. I wish to expand the possibilities of drypoint etching from cardboard, a process that suits a non-toxic environment.