China de la Vega grew up in dairy farming country at the foot of Saddleback Mountain, Kiama, South Coast New South Wales. Her mother was an obsessive art enthusiast who encouraged her four daughters, China being the youngest, to form an art practice at a very early age. In the converted milking shed the girls worked on art projects between school.
China in particular was drawn to using the materials which she found around the farm. ‘There was freedom in this. The ability to make what you wanted without permission or assistance. With less reliance.’
Following the completion of a BA in Communications (majoring in Writing, 2004) at UTS, China travelled to Tennant Creek where she worked and lived for close to four years. Working with Indigenous Artists, Musicians and Writers, but primarily with painters in remote communities, she made work from the detritus of Aboriginal community life and abandoned mining sites; squashed span cans and ceramic fragments, anything with colour, shape or quality.
Arriving back in Sydney in 2008, China put together a solo exhibition for the Damien Minton Gallery. ‘It was quite strange. There was never the idea to exhibit. My first opening was the first opening I had ever been to in town, other than a show of paintings my sister had put on some years before. I had always made things and shown them to people and found it quite funny, very embarrassing, that I was now an 'exhibiting artist'. But it was thrilling. I got used to it, and liked it very much.’
Since Something or Nothing? (Damien Minton Gallery) 2008, China has worked out of studios in Beijing and Jingdezhen, mainland China, and has continued to exhibit her work. For the moment she lives in Sydney with her three year old son Martin in a place that looks over the harbour.
Her current body of bound fabric figures (like the spam cans of the Northern Territory experience, and the industrial building products used when making work in China) capture the temper of the time and environment she is living in.
‘This new work reminds me of A Room of One's Own (Wolf) which I read too long ago to reference with any great accuracy. When I made the figures I suddenly felt as though an imagined Mary Beton, Mary Seton or Mary Carmichael had sent something out through the tiny key hole of that great timber door; from the seclusion and the frustration but also from the safety of her own small room; made from the few things that belong her and to her; at once resigned and victorious; at once about art and craft and men and women, perhaps about the inside and the outside too.’
