Toronto-based artist Christine Kim creates intricate collage pieces that explore the idea of boundaries — both in her choice of materials and narratives. She looks to investigate the idea of displacement and how it borderlines transient and permanent conditions. She specializes in illustration, installations and sculpture.
Although she works in both 3-D and 2-D formats, her most recognized pieces are multi-layered pencil drawings that are supplemented by watercolor backdrops and paper cut images, which resemble lace, to produce beautiful yet dark feminine imagery. Works like At the End of All of this Language and Withdrawn I and II, all of which encompass this multi-layered characteristic, take interest in the quiet, shy gestures of the body. According to the artist, the lace-like paper cutouts that surround her subjects represent a fence, an obvious declaration of territory that both conceptually and literally releases and represses, protects and encumbers.
In her most recent series, Accumulation, Kim moves away from the multi-layered narratives and creates 3-D objects with paper cutouts. Using matte white and black paper, Kim constructs geometrical structures assembled like puffy, cumulous clouds. Through the complex folds and patterns of the paper sculptures, Kim explores the relationship between light and shadow, and positive and negative space. Furthermore, Kim looks to investigate the versatility and limitations of paper when it’s folded, cut, curved and gathered to create a sculptural object.
