Armed with a background in Textile Design in the textile
industry in England, Christine White relocated to New Zealand in
1984 to work in ceramics before completing a Diploma in Fine Arts
at Otago Polytechnic in 1996. In 1997, White attended Auckland
Institute of Technology, graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts
majoring in Printmaking. She currently lives and works in
Tauranga.
White's monoprint works on paper and her paintings on canvas
focus on the ideas of chaos theory and unity, order and
completeness as it extends from scientific theory into
general secular understanding and finally to multi-faith religious
belief. Earlier works focus on the concepts and symbolism of the
mandala, a religious emblem that has its origins in
Tibetan Buddhism. As her career has progressed, White has
extended the thematic concerns of her work to encompass Cartesian
dualism and the aesthetic idea that an underlying order is an
essential facet of beauty. Informing much of White's work is the
belief that order and unity and their opposing elements of chaos
and disarray are common themes underpinning life. As such, White's
works strive to make the understanding of this concrete in visual
form. As she explains, 'my images contain a certain type of
geometry, considered at moments throughout the history of art,
as one of the essential components of ' beauty'. I explore the
possibility as with the Chaos Theory, that chaos may be thought of
as a highly complex order, and that there is chaos hidden within
regularity.'