About the Photography and Biography of Christine Brauchli

Unknown living spaces – a parallel world, perhaps. A process that enchants, image by image, yet is somehow related to the life we live, that takes shape, dances and becomes transformed – sometimes ecstatically – in playful, fragrant colour. Seemingly corporeal beings are simultaneously floating, solidifying and dissolving accumulations of energy, all within the same apparition. Everything soars and wafts, in a pure zest for living. A liberated world, based on a hidden secret law. Constantly reappearing, vital beings elude any identification, transform themselves into new lifeforms, immediately known yet unknown … In each of these images, the creator of this totally autonomous world captures the most productive moment of the process with unerring photographic accuracy and with a strong sense of composition that makes the image itself the subject matter, the essence.

In the first instance, the nude photographs appear to convey complete intimacy. We see the figure of a woman, sometimes as the same woman in three feminine forms at the same time. A sense of timelessness prevails. An omnipresent darkness in the image  draws one’s glance into it. Anyone who seeks to know the secret of this darkness, sounding it with thought and reflection, risks losing their spirit in the rapture that lies beneath. But the woman simply stands there, perfectly calm; no hint of desperation here. She breathes beauty, sensuality, self-assured presence. She is the single pole of the universe, the incarnation of the woman’s dignity. She stands there naked in the chill of outer space, yet all for whom her apparition is important warm themselves near her fire, for her immense, inner light speaks a strong language. “I too have the strength to stand like this – unveiled, transparent and luminous”, we hear our inner voice saying. “The darkness that I see is my light that is as yet unborn. My origin, and all the richness from that origin, is the light that fills me and that I am.”

Christine Brauchli, a Swiss citizen, was born in 1957 in Bregenz, Austria and already as a young girl she enjoyed drawing with pencil, chalk and charcoal, with a preference for female nude studies. She also painted watercolours and worked with modelling clay, studied art therapy for a time and aimed to become a sculptor. But along with her experiences with the energy of creativity, she also came to know people by working as a nurse, district nurse, social worker and now for many years as a self-employed holistic body therapist. Her energy work, therapeutic interactions and artistic work find their common foundation in an expansion of consciousness, creating scope for new insights, forms and transformations. She is constantly astonished by the what and how of life’s manifestations, in particular the manner in which the entities of nature, intellect and soul become embodied in bewitching forms and colours on both the earthly and artistic levels, by how humdrum reality can be transformed when she becomes attuned to it in the creative act, so that a new world opens up within and behind it. She has been deeply influenced as an artist by those she has supported through their transition when dying. And her description of the process that leads to a slowly revealed new dimension has echoes of an aesthetic of dying: “A door opens into another space into which a human being extends and lives on.” It is these signposts to different dimensions, transformations and incarnations that Christine Brauchli imparts to us in her art.

Matthias Odermatt

About Christine Brauchli’s Photographs

Apparitions have fascinated mankind since the earliest times.
Apparitions are perceived as “gifts from heaven”, revealing what is beyond words, even beyond belief. Their language is often symbolic or abstract, not of this world and there are always questions that remain unanswered.
When we see such apparitions before us as photographs, the images are generally blurred or fuzzy and proof of their authenticity is somehow not forthcoming …
Christine Brauchli’s large-scale nude photographs in the “Light Being Series” are similarly blurred and fuzzy but with the signs reversed, because here it is precisely through this blur that they give us a glimpse into the souls of these figures. The forms, mostly emerging from a universal black, develop an almost magic radiance that immediately appeals to the receptive viewer.
These figures represent light beings on the trail of human existence.
Even the non-figurative depictions evoke magical associations that we can situate either in our innermost space or in the furthest reaches of interstellar expanse.

The energy images of Christine Brauchli unerringly catch the centre of our existence, quite unpretentiously and worlds away from any kind of New Age romanticism.

Andreas Schneider