The Interior Project

This project begun in 2005, when Christine Dixie was pregnant with her second child. Integrating cartographic, religious, and medical references it aims to unsettle established norms between the exterior world and the interior space of the body.

Several works from this project are in the collection of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum and the UJ Art Museum. Many of the works from this project were exhibited at Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg in 2007 at a mid-career retrospective. Recently several works from this project were exhibited at Iziko Museum on the exhibition Motherhood: Paradox and Duality (2025-2026).

Parturient Prospects (2007)

Parturient Prospects (2007)In Parturient Prospects ' Dixie situates her experiences against Western discoursed, especially images from early modern Europe. Focusing on the ways in which visual representations construct woman as 'other', Dixie invokes reference to woman as 'other', Dixie invokes reference to not only representations of birth and maternity but also religious, medical and geographical images. While the Gendered underpinnings of theses discourses are not always immediately transparent when they are invoked simultaneously, Dixie's works reveal that they are in fact mutually reinforcing agents and indeed often use related tropes. (Schmahmann, 2007)

https://christinedixie.com/exhibitions/parturient-prospects

The Harbingers (2022)

The woodblocks in The Harbingers are cut into the shape of the roundels depicted in the map, with writing which names the source of the fourteenth century image carved into the sides. The interior scenes which focus on the scenes of labour also include reference to objects such as the sextant, used for navigation, or views of ships out at sea. These references to discourses associated with expedition and discovery underscore the exclusion of women from these historical events and act to reinforce the gendered norms played out in the birth process.

https://christinedixie.com/exhibitions/the-harbingers