Sense of place — and the awareness of sensing — has been a major thread throughout Hengst’s work, which ranges from community oriented public art projects across several countries, to intimate paintings created in her studio in Santa Fe.
Site-specific public pieces, most involving clay, include three bus stop shelters in Santa Fe, a large collaborative sculpture with volcano for a plaza in Ecuador, two Haiku paths, and the four-year traveling international installation “birds in the park”.
Hengst’s paintings layer multiple materials and methods including printmaking, drawing, encaustic, and text. They have been exhibited in solo shows in galleries and museums nationally and internationally.
After college, Christy Hengst set off westward in a station wagon with a cabinet full of gessoed panels, a cigar box of oil sticks, and a bed in the back. Visiting people and painting all along the way, she eventually landed in Santa Fe, NM. There she met her future husband and creative partner, German blacksmith Helmut Hillenkamp, with whom she has since collaborated on many public and private projects, including raising two kids.
Statement
Content: This body of work has developed from exploring the land around where I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the last 30 years. Many of the paintings are clustered around specific paths and plants encountered along the way. But as much as this work is about specific places, it’s also about returning to a place of not-knowing, and building intimacy through renewed curiosity.
Process: Truly the beginning of each piece is a leap of faith; jumping in to make the first mark, with an idea or without an idea, it may feel random. After that, the listening and responding begins. A meditation cushion in my studio faces the piece I'm working on. When I'm not sure what comes next, I have a seat to look and wait. It's a conversation. My job is to tune in to such a degree that trust blooms -- at that level, there are no random marks! I follow the lead of the piece.
Technique: The layering of text, direct drawing, transparent prints and painting is one of the ways I weave together visual decisions and meaningful content. I create silkscreen and solar plate prints from drawings or photographs I've made in the field. I print them onto rice paper, and embed them into the surface of the painting, with previous layers showing through. Layering allows for ambiguous or dreamlike aspects of reality, and an element of time, to slip in. Recently, ripped selections of zen books, as well as my own written notes, form the foundations for many of my paintings; the text works on two levels, visually and content-wise. The text often becomes obscured by the drawing and painting that happens on top of it — nevertheless, it’s an important layer in the build-up of the character of these pieces.