Christine Mauersberger is a Cleveland artist who produces complex mark-making narratives in two and three dimensions, from large-scale private and public commissioned works to intimate embroidered pieces. Her process is rooted in the hand-stitching she learned from her mother as a child, reimagined for the internet age: both analog and digital, a reflection of the natural world, and of what man has done to nature.

Her commissions include custom mixed media screen-printed paintings, custom wallpaper, and permanent sculpture installations. Her work is featured in private and public collections and has been exhibited and published internationally including in Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, and Italy. 

In addition to creating art, she also teaches, leading workshops on art book-making and intuitive hand stitching and giving lectures throughout the United States and abroad.

She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including a Creative Workforce Fellowship in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, a Windgate Craft Artist Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and funding from ArtPlace America and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has also been awarded the Ohio Arts Council Award of Individual Excellence twice. 

Christine lives and creates in her native Cleveland, Ohio less than ten miles away from the Slovak civic club where her parents went dancing every Saturday night when she was growing up.

If you are interested in commissioning a piece, you can contact her here. For pieces available for purchase, see here.

STATEMENT

My body of work is aesthetically eclectic. Hard and soft. Digital and analog. Some pieces fill a room, others can be held in your hand. The common thread is that each piece attempts to make the invisible visible.

For my drawings and hand-stitched work, the invisible element is time. Much of how we live our lives is rooted in how we spend our time. Every slowly stitched mark or carefully drawn line creates a visual map of the time it took to create. Stitching and drawing are both meditative, a way of thinking with my hand. The end results in both records time and transcends it, making a series of moments into something permanent. Often these marks are structurally map-like, and I consider these works to be maps of my own interior landscape. 

For my commissions and installations, the emphasis moves away from an intimate intellectual record, and shifts to creating an immediate visceral effect in the viewer by bringing unseen elements of a space to life. I often choose to work with textiles for installations because of their ability to transform from being stiff and flat to flowing and responding to air movements in the room. These movements are there, but invisible. These works allow a space to be perceived in a new way.

It is my hope that my work captures not only the reality of time passing but also the distillation of what remains when the unimportant parts of life have been removed.