Christina Mesiti
Christina Mesiti uses sculpture and photography to expand a sense of self beyond the edges of the body into one entangled with its environment. She lives and works nomadically within public land in the western US. Christina makes use of materials like ice, pine resin, charcoal, sand, and hydrocal to allow her body to hold and be held by the landscape. She makes molds of gestures of holding, touching, and offering that explore the positive and negative forms of her body and how it contains or meets the space around it. The moment of touch, material, body, and light becomes caught/collapsed in the photographic images. Mesiti arrives in an area and spends time watching for a studio camp, a spot with certain qualities of solitude, protection from the elements, a sense of something geologically or ecologically to learn from. She tries to spend an uninterrupted week there, usually determined by the water supply. Christina returns periodically to the spot to be with it across a season. She walks and responds intuitively to features in the land with her body. Sometimes she makes objects that are left to integrate in the land, photographed and destroyed, or carried with her until they resolve in relation to another place.
Collaboration Christina was essential in researching and installing a Dakota Fire Hole for clay firing. She also selected a location to develop a contemplative seating area with collected stones.
