Christine Borland

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Christine Borland (born 1965) is a British artist and one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Christine Borland was born in Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland. She attended the University of Ulster, and the Glasgow School of Art.

She works with forensic science and medicine, including police and judicial processes and collaborations with the Medical Research Council’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at Glasgow University. She has said, "The heart of what I am trying to discuss is very dark, very strong and passionate, and if you can reach that through quite a rational process, I think it becomes more powerful, and importantly, more powerful to the viewer."^[1]

In November 1996, she presented a show Second Class Male, Second Class Female, which was of two reconstructed heads.

In 1997, for her first solo show in London, L'Homme Double at the Lisson Gallery, she commissioned 6 academically-trained sculptors to make life-size clay heads of the Nazi Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele from photocopied pictures of him which she provided and descriptions which Auschwitz survivors had made.^[2]

In 1997 she was a nominee for the "all women" Turner Prize, which was won by Gillian Wearing. Her work From Life was a record of her forensic reconstruction of a missing Asian woman. This started with a skeleton and concluded with a bronze cast of the head. The concern of the arist was with issues of depersonalisation of the individual that take place with medical establishments. Her rebuilding of a missing person was a process of re-personalisation.^[3]

Solo exhibitions include the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), Dundee Contemporary Arts, De Appel (Amsterdam}, Fundação Serralves (Lisbon) and Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich).

She is represented by the Lisson Gallery, London.