Artists statement

Nadine Christensen completed a Master of Arts in Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1997. Her innovative practice encompasses painting, installation and drawing and has comprised an ongoing investigation into natural phenomena. She draws on diverse sources including design and illustration, architecture, new and arcane technologies, science fiction, animation, tall stories and curiosities to engage the changing possibilities and conditions of light and perception. Christensen’s work also explores the desire to map and understand our environment as well as the role of narrative and story-telling in the unfolding of information throughout contemporary culture.

Christensen’s two related works, Three Piles, 2015 and Untitled (Vanity), 2016, are highly refined paintings featuring “still life” arrangements positioned across landscapes and abstract motifs. Combining complex montage, trompe l’oeil and textural effects they investigate heightened colour and pattern, forming compositions that occupy the juncture between the real and the imagined. Drawing on a vast range of personal, scientific, and popular sources they appear as speculative meditations on environment and place.