Maker of the Week - Christine Kaiser - News

Monday 13 February 2012

Christine grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York but spent most of her adult life in Cambridge, MA. Her roots are in the fine art world and she specialised in painting but soon after graduating, began experimenting with large figurative wall sculptures. To support herself, she worked at a Boston gallery repairing large papier-mache and metal animal sculpture. The work was very exacting and she was pretty obsessive about it: "This was where I developed many of the skills that I use in my work today. I have been a full time studio artist since 1995 and have been exhibiting at major craft shows and galleries since then", she says.

In Christine's words, her pieces are fairy tales: "Like most folktales their story isn't always revealed on first glance. My hope is to make them engaging enough so that you might linger over them and return to them again and again. Part of their charm is the tension between sweet and not so sweet. I use elements of cartoons, animation stills, dreams , and other references to weave my stories. To root the pieces in the world I use a fairly classical visual aesthetic".

Her pieces are made of carved and shaped wood - primarily basswood, pine and poplar - and various other materials. She uses a bandsaw to cut out the shapes, a large disc/ belt sander to do the initial shaping and hand and rotary tools to carve and detail. She likes a really smooth surface so she does a lot of hand sanding. The larger wall pieces are done on birch plywood panels - made by Christine - or set in antique boxes. The pieces are painted with multiple layers of water based paint, graphite and pencil drawing and finished with matte varnish.