Christine Boswijk is a pre-eminent New Zealand artist, for whom clay is the preferred medium. Her work is represented in public museum and art galleries' collections of importance nationally and internationally. For Boswijk, art must have meaning and fulfil its social purpose of direct relevance to the human condition and circumstance while also being expressive of its own materiality.

Kisses, Crosses and Flowers is a powerful and beautiful new body of work, redolent with symbolism and imagery. These works are containers of emotions and meanings. They represent a universal language and “access the deepest levels of the subconscious, bridging the worlds of reality and the imagination, and give form to the inexplicable.”

Boswijk sees clay (which comprises two-thirds of the earth’s crust) as symbolic of the life/death process. She states “I have shaped, fired and left it in its naked state, in that there is no glaze to conceal or confuse. I have made the wall works, with their clay roses, in the form of the cross; yet moved a few degrees they transpose into kisses: as if to suggest that all things change from moment to moment … For the free-standing forms, Kisses with Flowers, I intentionally contradicted the organic quality of the clay by using manufactured blooms to question, in a straight forward way, the disparity of nature’s rhythms.” (1)

These exceptional works are ambiguous, multi-layered signs of passion and innocence, doorways into meaning and loss, celebrations of love and memory.

1. Christine Boswijk, Artist Statement, July 30, 2007.