Obituary: Christine Borland, influential Turner Prize-nominated Scottish artist

A woman who wore her talents and achievements lightly, she was fascinated by hidden detail and the value of collaboration, and her painstakingly researched and developed art works made you feel as if she was granting you special access to a secret dimension she’d discovered.

For example, her 2001 installation, Ecbolic Garden (now on permanent display at the Centre for Health Science in Inverness), looked for all the world like an exquisite collection of glass containers suspended from the ceiling, and containing mysterious, delicate patterns. What really lay within were bleached samples of plants that had been used in traditional medicine hundreds of years ago to induce miscarriage.

And one element of The Power of Twelve, shown at Mount Stuart in Bute in 2018, appears at first to be a fun pink ring surrounding lots of pretty bubbles. Inspired by the building’s history as a World War I hospital, it’s composed of 444 hand-blown glass circles inside a tube made from an army parachute, stuffed with moss of the kind used to swab wounds during that war. The circle mimics the craters left by mines exploded in Flanders, and the glass orbs are redolent of the fishing floats (nicknamed “witch balls” – and that’s a whole other avenue to explore) attached to anti-submarine booms during World War II.

Borland, an only child, was born in Ayrshire, where her parents John and Chrissie both worked for textile manufacturer John Airds, known locally as Jock Airds – one of many lace factories operating in the Irvine Valley at the time.

As was tradition at the time, Chrissie gave up work when she became a mother, and Borland’s childhood was wild and free. Her parents casually passed on to her their knowledge of nature, whether by teaching her the names of the creatures and plants or by healing her scrapes and stings with leaves. Plants and dead insects were a natural part of her artistic toolkit from a young age.

Borland’s time at the Glasgow School of Art would have a profound impact on her professional and personal life. Life drawing wasn’t something that came easily to her, but she was fascinated by the representation and preservation of bodies, and a trip to Glasgow’s Hunterian anatomy collection lit a fire within her. She knew straight away that she wanted to engage more sculpturally with the human body – both materially and ethically (a few decades later the Hunterian would commission Borland to create To Be Set and Sown in the Garden, which features, among other works, a series of low benches whose heads are based on cadaver headrests in dissection theatres).

At GSA, Borland was a student on David Harding’s famous environmental art course, whose other alumni included Douglas Gordon, Claire Barclay, Martin Boyce, Jacqueline Donachie and David Shrigley.

Alongside fellow tutor Sam Ainsley, Harding, who died last year, encouraged a spirit of community and sharing, underlining the importance of connecting art with life, developing lasting relationships and having fun.

These principles stayed with Borland, who would become noted for her collaborations with institutions not traditionally associated with the art world, driven by her sincere appreciation of their expertise. The first major example of this was From Life, shown at Glasgow’s Tramway in 1994. For this she bought an anonymous female skeleton from an online medical educational catalogue, and worked with forensic anthropologists and facial reconstruction experts, eventually reconstructing the woman’s face in bronze.

This work led to her questioning the ethics – built upon colonial legacies – of the commercial trade in human remains.

Bullet Proof Breath was another striking result of collaboration, which began after she learnt that spider silk could be used in bullet-proof vests.

Borland’s desire to work with others extended to local community groups too, as evidenced in her 2022 Flax Turns Foundation Cloth work, which investigated the heritage of the 18th-century linen industry in Huntly, Aberdeenshire. Among many other elements, it involved the planting and processing of flax, and the sharing of seeds.

While at the Glasgow School of Art Borland met fellow artist – and one of the founders of indie band the Soup Dragons – Ross Sinclair, who would go on to become a lecturer there himself. They got together after graduating and were married in Orkney in the summer of 2012. They had three daughters, Grace, Agnes and Jean, who they adored.

In 2020 Borland became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and ten years ago she was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from Glasgow School of Art/the University of Glasgow. She was also a part-time professor of fine art at Northumbria University. Her works are in public collections all over the world, including The Tate Gallery in London; The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; The Wellcome Collection in London; Les Musées d’Annecy in France and The Centre for Contemporary art in Sydney, Australia.

Christine Borland was diagnosed with cancer in spring 2024, shortly after the unveiling of the Edinburgh Seven tapestry commission, which honoured the first women to have studied medicine in the UK (at the University of Edinburgh). As a warm intellectual who’d made the ethics of medicine such a key part of her thinking, she was typically open and curious about the impact of her illness and the treatment she received.

She even drew parallels between these medical interventions and her earlier work, such as in February, when she posted on social media images of her radiotherapy mask fitting alongside a picture of her 2010 film, SIMWOMAN, which involved manikins used by medical students for acute care situations. (The default models had male bodily features, and she had played with the idea of “feminising” them by hybridising them with moulds of her own bodily extremities.)

Christine Borland, who lived and worked in Kilcreggan, on the west coast of Scotland, died in hospital, and is survived by her husband, Ross Sinclair, and daughters Grace, Agnes and Jean Borland Sinclair.

After her death, the University of Ulster, where she did her MA, quoted words she herself had recently written: “Art and artists, cross-disciplinary warriors negotiating the medical space, hang on in there. I can truly say from experience, your work and research is vital for better understanding across teams of experts, patients, their families and right now, for me.”