Christopher Stewart is an artist exploring themes of rehearsal, the performance of masculinity and the relationship between conflict and the environment. Stewart’s enigmatic photographic and filmic works unsettle and seduce with their interplay of the documentary and memoir. Whilst resembling constructed film stills, Stewart’s works are never staged, but rather observed moments of rehearsed scenarios and environments that he has gained access to.
Christopher Stewart’s childhood was one of living on police estates throughout London and observing the intersections of state control and the familial: his father was a Metropolitan Police officer and would often share his experience of detective training and police procedures with his son. In this environment, boys watched men shape identities based on physical strength, an undercurrent of violence and intimidation combined with an awareness and fear of emotional and bodily fragility and vulnerability. The complexity of masculinity within the ‘disciplinary class’ - working class backgrounds having been traded for positions of seeming power and stability - is a space Stewart has explored within his practice through the biographical, political, and literary. During a brief period in the military in his teens, Stewart realised that this performance of masculinity within powerful and often secretive organisations was one he wanted to dissect rather than enact.
Christopher Stewart’s work has been exhibited widely including at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art in Norwich, The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, Open Eye in Liverpool and Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland, with work held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Martin Z. Margulies collection, Miami.
Writing and curatorial research projects are also central to Christopher’s practice. Collaborative research projects include the exhibition and book Staging Disorder and the collaborative Wellcome Trust funded research project and moving image work, Constellations, both with artist Esther Teichmann. Stewart received an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art and a PhD in the Faculty of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.