Christine Baxter comes from a long line of artists and craftspeople. Her great-great-grandfather was a wrought iron gate maker, her grandfather a woodcarver trained at Kensington School of Art, her mother studied fashion design, and her father was both a landscape designer and photographer. Creativity and making are deeply rooted in her heritage, drawing and sculpting have always come naturally.
Christine discovered a deep love for clay early on and never looked back. She completed her foundation studies at Cambridge College of Technology under the guidance of sculptor Mike Gillespie, a former assistant to Jacob Epstein. She went on to study at Camberwell in the early 1980s, during a time when traditional figurative skills were still central to the curriculum.
Her work is predominantly figurative and representational, but the form is simply a means to a deeper exploration. Christine is primarily interested in the emotional response her work provokes. While creating a piece, she consciously reflects on her own emotional connection to it, with the hope that it will evoke a similar visceral reaction in the viewer. For her, a successful sculpture is one that “gets you in the guts.”
