Drawn On, Drawn In: Christina Bryant
Visual Arts
University of Hertfordshire Galleries is delighted to present Drawn On, Drawn In, an exhibition of drawings, installations and performance by Christina Bryant, winner of the Margaret Harvey Gallery Open Exhibition 2008.
Concerned with the medium of drawing, Bryant explores the use of line to map everyday, human environments, and attempts to question and distort our relationship to these intimate spaces. By creating new site-responsive drawings and installations which visitors to the exhibition can walk into, Bryant attempts to chart the unreachable space of illusion and imagination. The drawings map out a suggestion of a physical space but, by their simplicity present an emptiness that leaves the viewer questioning where the space begins and where it ends.
At the opening Bryant will conduct a performance in which she will continue her enquiry into how line can be used to record space and time. Bryant will be encased in a protective house constructed of translucent fabric which is a recurring motif in her work. In recording a space which is moving and progressing Bryant becomes both the observer and the observed, creating a new dialogue of observation and interaction.
As well as Bryant’s site-responsive work, the exhibition will also include the ‘skins’ of her protective houses from past performances.
Bryant concludes ‘I find that the more I explore the process and illusion of drawing, the more its possibilities open out. It is fluid, changeable, and continually questioning our boundaries, mimicking and recording our own experiences and imagination. Like ourselves, it seems to contradict, limit and extend, confuse and create, questioning our reality and giving us a language to explore our human condition.’
Bryant is currently based in Hitchin and has a studio at the Digswell Arts Trust, Hertfordshire. She has exhibited in a number of shows in England. Bryant gained a BA from the University of Hertfordshire in Fine Art and will be starting her MFA at Wimbledon College of Art in September 2009.