Christine Forni
Drawing You Outside
Solo Exhibition - Cultivator at Bray Grove Farm
Sunday, June 8, 2025, 2-5pm
Cultivator is pleased to present Christine Forni’s exhibition, Drawing You Outside, during Bray Grove Farm’s Spring Farm Day. This exhibition coincides with Claire Pentecost’s presentation of Human as Euphenism.
Please rsvp and join us on Sunday, June 8th from 2-5pm for art, conversation, light refreshments, and a day on our small holistic farm. You can drop in anytime. We are tentatively scheduling a drawing walk with Christine at 2:30pm, a walkaround with Claire at 3:15pm, and a tour of the farm with Brian and Joanne at 4pm. Bray Grove Farm is located 70 miles southwest of Chicago in Grundy County. To confirm your attendance and receive directions and parking information, kindly email joanne@cultivatorarts.com.
During a site visit to Bray Grove Farm, Christine Forni collected downed branches and twigs from Linden, Hackberry, and Mulberry trees. She brought them back to her Chicago studio where they were sorted and trimmed. Later they were burned in a firepit along Lake Michigan’s Promontory Point, creating homemade charcoal sticks. Her exhibition for Cultivator will include large paintings made with ink derived from the ash and drawn with the charcoal, an ink painted bench to observe the nature at the farm, and a participatory drawing project.
Forni’s connection to nature is a key element of her art practice. The subject matter, the materials, and the process are all tied into observing the environment. Her formative years were spent in the industrial cities of Pittsburgh and Detroit, living in apartments alongside a forest preserve. Her art reflects this contrast with combinations of human-made and natural materials. Forni will use the setting of the farm as a backdrop for her drawings, allowing the wind, sunlight, and elements to intervene. Her ongoing project, Drawing You Outside will invite guests to grab a charcoal stick, paper, and drawing board and walk around the ten acre parcel with her, casually rendering the observance of nature.
Drawing You Outside, is an environmental community drawing project and part of my eco-social art practice. It is a way for participants to escape the experience of seeing through the lens of digital screens while getting back in touch with nature. I collect fallen sticks to create charcoal drawing sticks from where the participants experience drawing in nature, this proximity to nature from their hand to what they see infuses into their work and provides a closer connection to the natural world.
I offer a way for participants to be outdoors together, to reconnect through the analog process of drawing. I walk paths and consider the shapes, forms or fragments from nature they’ll see. With the assembled participants, I begin collecting visuals through recording, sound, drawing, writing, or photographing and use this research for my future installations
When I plan for a Drawing You Outside, I locate a place that may be special for others to experience. I share these places with them one-on-one while we walk, having environmental conversations and drawing together. If they have technical questions about drawing, I share my insight with them on how to draw light using an eraser or how to interpret sound through mark making. One aspect that is particularly gratifying is the feedback loop I experience with others, making charcoal in preparation, drawing on the path and the connections we make afterwards.
-Christine Forni
Christine Forni is a painter and sculptor examining links between human behavior and the natural world. Her work focuses on environmental compassion through poetic connections of habitat, alchemy, anthropology, and memory. She has exhibited at venues including Ueno Royal Japanese Art Museum and Awagami Paper Museum (Japan), DeCordova Sculpture Museum, (Massachusetts), Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico), Museo Internazionale Italia Arte and Museo di Scienze Naturali (Italy), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Heaven Gallery, The Franklin, and the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago).
Forni created Drawing You Outside , an environmental community project collaborating with poets, environmentalists, botanists, historians, physicists, writers, performance and sound artists. She was invited to speak and exhibit her work at the Academia Romania in Bucharest, on the phenomena of design and evolution in nature. In 2023 she was the guest speaker at Freedom, Design and Evolution, a physicist conference in Turin, Italy at the Energy Center giving an artist talk about her practice and environmental outdoor drawing project. Her botanical sculptural drawing installations evolved during the artist’s residencies in Paris at École du Breuil and the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée where she drew enlarged microscopic details of specimens amassed by naturalists. Her new work simultaneously bridges both painting and sculpture evoking a visual echo of slide specimens enlarged to many times their normal size, and points to how observation and analysis play in the artist’s practice.
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