Christine McKechnie
Christine McKechnie is a collage artist living in Southolt, a small village in north east Suffolk four miles from Eye, where her husband built her a studio at the end of a long garden.
She began making collages in 1968 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, having emigrated there with her husband and young daughter, and came to the form by way of papier mache, American patchwork quilts, applique hangings and Matisse. She was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition a number of times between the seventies and the nineties, and in 1983 won a Royal Academy special award for her work with paper. She has had one man shows in Parsons Green and Bloomsbury and at the Chelsea Arts Club and the Glyndebourne Festival, and in 1995 wrote a book on the art of paper collage commissioned by Search Press.
She and her husband moved to Suffolk permanently in 1990. She was a founder member of Artworks, a group of thirty Suffolk artists, gives talks and demonstrations to art clubs, and is qualified to run collage projects in primary schools.
Artist Statement
On my first day at school, having cried all the way, I drew a tree covered with branches and leaves, and stopped crying. Decades later I still love drawing trees.
I create collages produced with watercolour painted paper, where every piece is cut out by hand. The paper is applied and layered, employing sometimes hundreds of pieces to build up and produce my unique works of art.
I like the edges and incidentals of places, nothing manicured; showing signs of human activity, a line of figures on a rock, a man digging, a woman hanging out washing.
I always use artists' watercolours for painting my papers and permanent white gouache when I need an opaque colour. One of their qualities apart from being that of an elaborate watercolour is their texture and sense of depth coming from the build-up of papers.