Christine Lee: By Hand

Quint Gallery is pleased to present Christine Lee: By Hand, the artist’s first exhibition with Quint Gallery. Lee is a San Diego-based artist and designer whose interdisciplinary practice is presently centered on a variety of research tools that bridge traditional craft processes with both computer technology and direct-hand manipulation. The exhibition will include an intimate selection of three unique bodies of work, including mono- and bichromatic weavings using materials like cotton, wool, and copper wire, and hand-stacked wall compositions made from painted shims. With a background in woodworking and design, her work reflects her deep affinity for and attention to patterns, salvaged materials, and the natural environment.

Her woven works begin with a drawing or watercolor, translating color and fluid gesture into patterns and intervals that are made using a digital loom. Far from automated, using a digital loom is a highly physical and mechanically intensive process to translate digitized files through the traditional processes of lifting and lowering vertical warp threads to intersect with horizontal weft threads. Through different weaving patterns, Lee explores textures and tones as forms of visual weight, both subtle and dramatic. Patterns constructed through the processes of weaving and stacking serve aesthetic and functional purposes simultaneously. When weaving on a loom, visual patterns emerge while the structure of the fabric is created. In works composed of stacked shims, the tapered wood pieces commonly used as building supply are sorted according to slight variations in size and shape. Lee then individually selects and stacks the shims laterally from the bottom upward within a frame. Once the final pieces are in position, they are permanently secured by carefully removing sections of shims to adhere them to the supporting panel. In these works, the organic geometry of repeating interlocking patterns becomes visible as the structure of the vertical plane is formed.

Christine Lee received her Master of Fine Arts in Furniture Design/Woodworking from San Diego State University and her Bachelor of Science in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a Senior Sustainability Scholar of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University where she also taught in the School of Art of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. She is a 2022 recipient of the Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Craft. She has participated in numerous residencies at places such as Djerassi, Recology, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Workshop Residence, and as the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Artist-at-Sea. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the 2022 UN Ocean Conference at the Ciência Viva Museum in Lisbon, the Explorers Club in New York City, Museum for Art in Wood, Traver Gallery in Seattle, SOFA Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Bellevue Arts Museum, the Society of Arts and Crafts, the Society of Contemporary Craft, the Aspen Art Museum, the Racine Art Museum, and the ASU Art Museum. She lives and works in San Diego, CA.