Christine Baxter

Bio
I come from a family of artists and craftspeople. My great-great-grandfather was a wrought-iron gate maker; my grandfather, a woodcarver trained at the Kensington School of Art; my mother studied fashion design; and my father was a landscape designer and photographer. Making and drawing have always been central to my life. I completed an art foundation at Cambridge College of Technology under the sculptor Mike Gillespie. In the early 1980s, I studied at Camberwell, where traditional figurative skills were still taught. After several years in the film and model-making industry producing consumer products for Disney, Warner Bros., Lucasfilm and others, I established my own studio practice. My studio is now based in South Wales, near Raglan, at Court Robert Arts. My work is primarily figurative and representational, though representation serves as a vehicle for exploring emotional response. While sculpting, I examine my own reactions to the subject, aiming to create a similar dialogue with the viewer. Once the physicality of clay and the model's likeness are established, subtle shifts in expression—an angle of the mouth, tension in the brow, the focus of the eyes— can alter the emotional tone. In both human and animal subjects, gesture, weight, balance and bodily language shape the work’s impact. Successful figurative sculpture engages the viewer at a visceral level.