Today, nothing extraordinary happened. There was plenty to contemplate though, and that is something I learnt from Nadine Christensen. For more than two decades, she has painted what is right in front of her, opening up to the banal and the everyday. Her survey exhibition at Buxton Contemporary, Around, brings together 80 works made between 1998 and 2023, and offers a visual record of our time and culture through graphically distilled meditations on the quotidian.

In Christensen’s paintings, flies, wheelbarrows, furniture, ironed bed linen, stones, and relics of modern technology are mashed up in unexpected compositions. Smooth surfaces and clean lines depict surreal still-lifes, inspired by collected observations. Information unravels slowly from her paintings, and looking is rewarded. “There is a lot of variation in the way the works are made, the methodologies, imagery, and the source materials” Christensen reveals. Behind each work, “there are layers of other paintings underneath”. She labours over each composition, sometimes for years.

In Around, works are presented achronologically over two floors, and themes weave in and out of focus. “The exhibition corrals and brings my practice together” she reflects. A banged-up Holden Camira greets you as you enter the gallery. The weary body of the tyre-less car is painted in two tones of matte yellow. The same car reappears throughout the exhibition. In Slow Motion, 2023, a video work, Christensen sits in the driver’s seat and is towed through Reservoir on hard rubbish day. The journey, shown in slow motion, passes piles of broken, unloved, forgotten, and unused objects. The leftovers.

The same car, in coloured disguises, pops up in paintings such as Pistachio Dreaming, 2003, and CMYK, 2006. This circular flow of ideas and imagery Christensen calls “through lines”. Other things like tripods, windows, doors, and circles have also held her interest. “When it’s all together like this, you get this other idea of what a practice is over time. I can see how these ideas have churned through my practice and can be thought about differently as you stretch across it” she says, acknowledging that the exhibition is a rare opportunity to see a carefully curated selection of works spanning an entire career.

Christensen collects her subject matter from what is around her. Objects, routines, movies, and lost socks all catch her eye and can feed into her paintings. She is drawn to the “overlooked and underestimated”, and brings attention to some of life’s essential trivialities. She realises that “The everyday is not always a beautiful thing, it can be eye watering and even stressful!” She validates a mutual feeling of monotony, but with a persistent curiosity.

She finds a new purpose for her children’s discarded scratch paper artwork, mimicking their work in Scratchy, 2019-20. Pesky flies feature in paintings such as Outside Painting, 2019, and Large Fly, 2019-23. She overturns each stone to reveal stories, connections, and even unconscious habits, noting that, “these little instances or disruptions in your everyday life can resonate in ways that we don’t quite understand, even through generations”.

In her new video work, doing nothing doing, 2023, shown on the Buxton Contemporary big screen, Christensen documents the unpleasant and monotonous task of picking up dog poo, all while having a light-hearted chat about bees. We are in on the joke, and this familiarity is what makes her work engaging and enjoyable. In Mirrors with Landscape, 2012, mirrors defy gravity and float over a barren stone landscape. A tiny monkey dances in front of one mirror—a cheeky discovery for those who look.

There are also ‘aha’ moments: CMYK, 2006, is presented upstairs as a floor installation on basic wooden stands, and the setup echoes the arrangement of art at the car-boot sale in Pistachio Dreaming, 2003. “We’ve spent a lot of time in consideration bringing these works into conversation with each other, and each element is contingent on the other elements” Christensen explains. There are many connections to draw, and the circularity between them is poetic.

Around is grounded in reality, exploring the quotidian with substantial depth and humour. Without shying away from complexity or ambiguity, Christensen invites viewers to contemplate the familiar and how it all fits together. She muses, “I think these things are curious and interesting to observe and sometimes these micro things might have bigger impacts than you imagine”.

Around
Nadine Christensen
Buxton Contemporary
On now—7 April