Christina Mackie (b. 1956, England) has delivered what appears to be more of a continuous series of works in evolution – rather than severe phases of production. This is probably the reason for Mackie’s never-ending attraction to colours’ properties, perceptive reactions and material capacities, naturally acting as a trait union for her consistent body of work and ample use of diverse media.
Her practice touches on the capacities of materials such as crystals, clay, garnet sand and pigment blocks against forces of compression, gravity, technology or the power of sheer empirical observation, exploring issues of sculptural solidity against painterly fluidity. Consequently, one can expect to find 12- 12-metre-high, colour-dipped silk nets ethereally suspended above circular containers of semi-crystalised dye, as well as free-standing sculptures assembled in Mackie’s customary montage fashion or chunks of raw glass, highlighting the artist’s interest in natural and man-made materials. Christina Mackie’s sculptural installations weave an intricate web of associations between their diverse physical components. Her installations also encompass 3D objects, digitally generated watercolours, ceramics, photographs and found tools. Holding an inherent respect for her materials and an intuitive understanding of the way things work, Mackie’s creative processes are often directed by what something can be made to do. Both personal and complex, her works are imbued with her own experience of the world and her private thought processes. Raised in Canada, Mackie has lived and worked in London since the 1970s.
Mackie won the Becks Futures Art Prize in 2005. She was also the recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award – a three-year production grant which she was awarded in 2010; in the same year, she received the Arts Council England 2010 Oxford/Melbourne Fellowship. Mackie won the Contemporary Art Society’s Commission to Collect annual award in 2012, exhibiting the resulting work The Judges III at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery in 2013. Among others, her works are present in both the Tate and the Arts Council collections. The Contemporary Art Society will support a monograph of her work, scheduled to be published this year.
