From phones to flies, artist inspired by the everyday

Artist Nadine Christensen says she's thrilled to have lasted 25 years in the male-dominated field of painting.

“You don't see surveys of women artists very often in Australia, it usually is men,” she told AAP.

The 53-year-old's first survey exhibition, Around, at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne, has been a chance to look back on her career, starting with her earliest painting – a flip phone with an antenna from 1998.

Christensen paints everyday objects using matt colours, and has a fascination with materials – one large scale painting of a rock has the actual rock it was painted from attached to it.

She works out of a studio in the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir, with time out to raise her three children one of the factors in the development of her work over the decades.

Her most recent artwork, Where Looking Feels Like Thinking, features a scene that could be from the streets of any Melbourne suburb.

It's a painting of a damaged tram stop on a plane of flat blue, broken by shards of landscape, which can be seen as though through broken glass.

Between the flip phone and the tram stop, there's been a quarter century of making art, and Christensen says it's been intriguing to see which of her subjects have endured and what has fallen away.

A recent everyday motif is the blowfly – Christensen began collecting dead flies and inspecting them closely, finding them simultaneously attractive and repulsive.

“I love that flies only live for a short time, and they are dirty and annoying and come from maggots,” she said.

“We're in consumption overdrive and it just seems to resonate.”

A giant blowfly painting is one of the biggest artworks in the show, which Christensen also decided to sign with a massive signature after hearing of similar artworks on show at the Venice Biennale.

There are also kinetic sculptures employing pulleys, such as suspended windchime-like forms that crash down loudly onto three cymbals when a rope is pulled.

The upper and lower floors of the show are connected with another pulley artwork – yanking on a rope at the base of the stairs sets off a rotating installation of flags at the top of it.

Lashed to a column of the downstairs gallery is the remains of an old Holden Carrera that Christensen bought online in 2019, and transformed into an artwork titled Do We Go Around Houses or Do Houses Go Around Us.

She bent the panels, jumped on the roof and covered it with dents, then took it to a luxury car detailer to have it coloured in the same matt tones as her paintings.

Christensen made a video artwork out of driving the Holden through the streets of Reservoir, then removed the wheels and chassis until the car was just a shell.

“It wasn't a good model, it was pretty hopeless, and I was attracted to it because it's a car from my era, I drove around in these cars,” she said.

“I think about it as a body that's still functioning but a bit life worn.”

A book about Christensen has been published to mark the exhibition.

Nadine Christensen: Around is on at Buxton Contemporary until April 7, 2024.