Christine Bentley was born, raised, and educated in the Atlanta area by Yankee-transplant parents. She studied fine art and then education before teaching high school art for 6 years. She continues to teach ceramics at a local art center. Currently seeking an MFA in Sculpture, she hopes to one day live with a symbiotic relationship of teaching and making.
Finding plants and animals sometimes more interesting than people, she spends most of her free time in the garden.
Artist Statement
On a daily basis, my visual stimulus is comprised of a coexistence of the industrial and the organic. I see trees growing over and through fences, weeds taking over abandoned lots, tree branches cut away to allow power poles to survive, roots of trees pushing up sections of the sidewalk and forests razed for new development.
There is a struggle that creates a vigorous and palpable tension where one could easily overtake the other. Though both sides have their losses and victories, neither has yet to completely destroy the other, creating a precarious balance lacking a winner or loser.
This body of work is a response to those moments, a recreation of these observations, an investigation of the visual collision between man and nature.