Some record suffering, torment and despair. Others record nothing but pure unadulterated joy and love, promise, the incandescence of a first encounter, the plain pride of a mother watching her daughter, a girl, a gift.
Look closely at any of Christina Grace's wrapped media panels and you find what a tree stump reveals when it's cut open, ring after ring, each one supposedly identical to the last, each one actually recording something different, a wetter year, a harder one, a good day set right beside a cruel one. Grace works the same way, thread laid across a board, flipped, continued on the reverse, thousands of times over, until repetition itself becomes a kind of prayer, something to hold onto whether what's being held is grief or gladness.
Sand sits along the line like scars rather than filler, marking the particular hour or day that broke from every other one around it, for better or worse. Whether the thread was holding her safe or restraining her changed by the day, sometimes by the hour, one answer curdling into the other without warning, and often both were true at once. Somewhere inside that same repetition was a way to disguise pain and wrap it in beauty. Placing joy and gratitude on a pedestal instead, letting them stand taller in the finished piece than the hardship ever got to, so they rose above hardship in defiant celebration.
Wrapped Media Panels
Her layered mixed-media panels carry the same instinct differently. Spray paint settles over and under sand and papier mâché. Suddenly the view stops looking constructed and begins looking weathered, a construct of time in a way humanity never could. something that happened over time rather than something made. The layering is a way of breathing, each pass a reminder to slow down, to let calm settle over what was too loud to sit with directly.
Several of these surfaces read less like backgrounds and more like cosmic landscape, built from the stardust that forms all of us, existing before time or Christina Grace ever touched them. Nothing here stands apart from the other elements, soil, stars, and self all carrying the same underlying energy in different textures.
Worked into several of these pieces is the same small mark, an ichthys, a quiet love letter to the version of herself who needed reminding that the path she was on was hers alone. A reminder that where she was is exactly where she needs to be even if the discomfort was apparent. Allowing the new stronger, more considered version of herself to emerge, Grace by name, grace by nature. Running underneath several works is literal prayer itself, set into the panel and cast in sand, painted over and buried again, until the words are no longer legible to anyone, including herself. Finally, it is enough to know they are holding the foundation together from inside, the way those same words held her.
What has emerged is twenty-three pieces, A journal, self-therapy rather than a finished statement, a personal record of rising from the cinders of a life that no longer served her. Joy this pure is proof that survival is the only thing being asked of her. All observed, nothing edited out.