Cristina Beth MFA

 

I was born in Ngaruawahia in 1963, and my childhood was spent moving around the North Island of New Zealand.

As a young adult I moved to West Auckland and discovered it was the perfect environment to harness my creative spirit and allow it to thrive, I have lived here ever since. 

I have three independent grown-up children, which I raised predominately on my own. In my forties I decided to seek formal qualifications for my artistic practice, I spent six years in full time study and achieved: a Certificate of Visual Art, from Rutherford High School and a BFA(HONS) and MFA(HONS) from Elam at Auckland University [2009]. Since then I have combined my art practice with working as a picture framer/art restorer at Homestead Framers in Henderson. I was trained by Charlie Rose in art restoration of oil paintings and de-foxing of paper works

Influenced by women artists working with repetition and everyday elements from the domestic environment, my work has been described as feminine feminism. As a child of the sixties I grew up surrounded by colour in fashion, the home and garden, these elements still influence me today. Nostalgic objects offer a portal to the past which are used as  a starting point in my art allowing for narratives to emerge. Memory links and threads play an important role to the repetition of the everyday, the small action repeated, building upon itself till it creates another state. This offers a form of integration on both a conscious and unconscious level and this process of movement and action, allows for the work to resonate in the spaces created.

Threads underline all of life for me, linking the micro to the macro, DNA to universal geometry, the nature of life. Order and chaos, yin and yang and the balancing of these two states. By exposing the abject, the private and the disquieting facts of life in such a gentle manner, I invite us to rejoice in the everyday, to find a space for the trauma and shadows of our humanness to co-exist with the abstract beauty of the ordinary and mundane. In doing so to allow for a space for healing and regrowth to occur

Carl Jung stated that,”In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”