Christine Kinsey – Welsh woman artist and author / Co-Founder, Artistic Director and Administrator of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales

Christine Kinsey is an artist and author whose paintings, drawings, film and writing reassess the way women have been portrayed in western Celtic / Christian culture and how this portrayal has influenced the way women are perceived and how they perceive themselves. A ‘conversation’ between the image and the word is central to her creative process. She has developed a group of female characters who inhabit her imagery and who follow a narrative line, which began in her childhood in Pont-y-moel, Monmouthshire. The layers of influence growing up in a working-class industrial area of south-east Wales, together with Cymreictod / Welshness, are the basis for the development of a visual language that embodies the culture of Wales and forms a backdrop against which each character enacts a role. Her images are portals into other worlds, incorporating symbols and motifs that transform the traditional representation of women to reveal the character’s search to become the subject not the object of the image and to bear witness to the injustices women continue to experience internationally. She creates these other visual worlds to enable her characters to act as guides and messengers and travel through time and space in order to explore the interface between the material and the spiritual, with each image forming a fragment of her ongoing creative process that follows a journey of becoming.