Christine Borland

Christine Margaret Borland (3 May 1965 – 19 July 2026) was a Scottish artist. Born in Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland, Borland was one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) and was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1997 (won by Gillian Wearing) following her exhibition From Life at Tramway, Glasgow. Borland lived and worked in Kilcreggan, Argyll. She was a BALTIC Professor at the BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art.

Background Christine Margaret Borland was born in Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland, on 3 May 1965. She studied Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art and later was awarded an MA from the University of Ulster in 1988. She was on the committee of Transmission Gallery, Glasgow from 1989 to 1991. In 2004, she became one of five artists awarded the prestigious Glenfiddich Artist in Residence programme. In 2012 she was appointed BALTIC Northumbria University Professor – where she headed the Institute of Contemporary Art in Newcastle upon Tyne. This is a collaborative venture between Northumbria University and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

She was a leading member of a generation of artists who contributed to the transformation of Glasgow in the 1990s into an internationally recognised hub of contemporary arts. Across an international career, Borland was recognised for cross-disciplinary projects with other fields, such as medical science and forensics, to explore ideas related to the history of medicine, medical ethics and human genetics.

Borland was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020.

Borland died on 19 July 2026, aged 61.

Practice Borland worked in the media of sculpture, printmaking and photography, and with a variety of materials including glass, china, fabric and bronze. According to the National Galleries of Scotland, she often "asked us to consider the fragility of human life and the way in which it is valued by social systems and institutions". Borland's practice highlights the depersonalisation of an individual's identity in Modern medical practices, and her work attempts to regain physicality and identity. Borland questioned how we identify scientific fact, objectivity and truth together with traditional, conventional forms of art material, such as bronze or ceramics, together with new technologies. This same information was provided to the 6 artists and was used to create portraitbusts. According to the National Galleries of Scotland:

Selected exhibitions Second Class Male, Second Class Female, November 1996 L'Homme Double, 1997, Lisson Gallery The Dead Teach the Living, 1997, Skulpture Projekte Münster, Münster, Germany Solo exhibitions include the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), Dundee Contemporary Arts, De Appel (Amsterdam), Fundação Serralves (Lisbon), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich) and Cast From Nature, Camden Arts Centre (London). In 2015 she collaborated with Brody Condon on Circles of Focus, presented at CCA Glasgow.

Selected collections Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh