All Artists
Christina Sporrong is an artist and metal sculptor based out of Northern New Mexico. She was born in Sweden and raised all over the world but abandoned big city life to live in the high mountain desert. Sporrong established Spitfire Forge, a commercial blacksmithing and fabrication shop in 1996. She teaches national and local welding and blacksmithing workshops as a means to empower women and to de-mystify the process of working with metal. She also teaches welding classes through the University of New Mexico and at Vista Grande Charter School. Sporrong’s work often contains an intersection of performance, sound, form and interactivity. A few highlights of these merging disciplines are Amortec, a disjointed romantic dance between a robot and a woman on stilts; The Heron Project, a kinetic sculpture that acts as an aerial performance playground; and Caged Pulse Jets, a fiery cacophonous sound sculpture that the audience can play like an instrument. With the installation Mitt Uthus Sporrong investigates the way that current collective human experience is condensed through memes. The audience is invited to sit, explore and meditate in solitude, inside a tiny red outhouse with hundreds of memes as well as phone screens covering the interior walls. With this exploration into socio-political themes and viral media she is uncovering the humor and power wielded by these familiar cultural sound bites. Her largest sculpture to date, is the Flybrary, a 40-foot tall steel head with book-like birds flying out from the top. The stylized planar head is looking upwards its eyes following the flock of aluminium book- birds with a contemplative stare. While it was installed at Burning Man, the interior of the head functioned as a fantastical multi-level library, filled with books, reading nooks, neuron inspired chandeliers, all of which created an inspiring space to allow your ideas to take flight. The Flybrary is currently freeing its thoughts at the Chatsworth House gardens in Derbyshire, England, as part of the Radical Horizons exhibition. Sporrong spends a good part of the year traveling and the rest of the year with her family at her homestead in Taos, NM.
