Christina Hesford is an artist-maker who uses textile processes, such as weaving and knotting, to make art objects and wall-based artworks. Growing up in Indonesia and Brazil has given her a keen awareness both of the commonality and the individuality of humans everywhere, and so she makes work about being human: the spectrum of the human condition.
In the West, beauty has often been associated with perfection. Her current work challenges notions of beauty by using imperfection to create beautiful works, often using knots to symbolise this. She has been inspired by the repair aesthetic of ‘kintsukuroi’ - the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold or silver lacquer and the understanding that the object is more beautiful for having been broken. She uses weaving as a framework to combine these various concepts.
From the traditional to the unorthodox, she uses a wide variety of materials including silk, wool, and linen, to paper, tree-fibres, de-commissioned firehoses, and polythene sheeting. There are obvious disparities between the market values of these various materials, however, what gives them their aesthetic values are the transformative making processes applied to them.
Weaving is an inherently time-intensive skill which challenges the trend towards an ever-quicker pace of life. Yet for Christina, the numbers, counting, repetition and rhythms prevalent in weaving and knotting make them peaceful and meditative making processes. The value and purpose of these objects is transformed by the time taken to make them, challenging the throw-away culture of consumerism.
Her practice alternates between the use of white, and the use of colour. White is both full and empty, providing a canvas for her conceptual ideas.
Christina Hesford makes work for galleries, public, and private spaces. She also makes site-specific installation works, undertakes commissions, writes for publication, is a lecturer and member of The 62 Group of Textile Artists.
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