Artist’s Statement

The work for this year's Downlands show is a celebration of the forty years of Christine's ongoing portrayal of the iconic Australian shearing shed. Forty years ago, working outside Charters Towers in North Queensland, she made a small painting of her boss's home property in the state's south west. It was her first shearing shed, and from that moment onwards it became the basis of her now full-time art practice.

In 2023 Christine travelled to Cunnamulla to visit this shed again, and has created a body of work about what it looks like now. Disconcertingly she saw, for the first time in forty years, that first painting again, now proudly exhibited in the station museum.

Since that initial commission, she has made artwork about more than a hundred different shearing sheds from Far North Queensland to Tasmania, her travels taking her across Australia’s heartland. She paints the architecturally significant and the workaday, the grand vistas and the small details, and much of what is in between. Christine takes, as her starting point, the shed in front of her, ending with a portrait of an Australian icon in an industry that, even with land use and markets in flux, continues to maintain its integrity and importance to Australia and the world.

THE SNIPPETS
Many projects include a separate body of work that tells a slightly different story.

The Charlotte Plains project was huge, and Christine noticed that with the breadth of the landscape it was almost too much to see in one go. She realised that she could only look at one small thing at a time - and the collection of those small things, those snippets, made it easier to portray this vast site. 

ALSO
Also included in this collection is work that tells of other sheds, in different landscapes. From the 2023 project "Shed on the Traprock" three works describe that fine wool country west of Stanthorpe, and another is from the northern tablelands.