Judith Christensen
Artist Statement
For me, an artist’s book has content, often text, and sometimes image, but not necessarily pages in the traditional sense. Tactile, three-dimensional surfaces—the side of a miniature house or an origami paper dress hanging on a string—function as pages.
My interest lies in the significance of the everyday concerns of life—from baking bread to pruning a rose, to conversations at the breakfast table. And my curiosity extends to the framework in which our daily life unfolds, the home. I have been involved with building and remodeling as long as I can remember, so my artwork often explores the house as a physical object as well as a container for the functioning of our lives. I like Gaston Bachelard’s term, “inhabited geometry,” to characterize this intermingling.
The interaction of memory, experience, place, and language is central in my work, so I often include vestiges from the past—from my past or someone else’s, discovered at thrift stores, libraries or in magazines or newspapers. It is not their source or their relationship to me that is significant. Rather, I search for items that suggest the imprint of human life, items that, when integrated with other elements, engage viewers in a dialog with the piece, with themselves, and hopefully with each other.