Christina Mackie
Artist Christina Mackie works in a variety of media, including but not limited to video, photography, sculpture, and drawing. Through these various mediums, Mackie produces dynamic, meditative works of art that are largely concerned with themes of materiality, socio-politics, and the natural world. Mackie is best known for her multi-layered sculptural installations, which she refers to as emotional landscapes. Within these works, Mackie fuses disparate objects—tree trunks, crystal balls, and wooden slats, among other items—with the aim of creating certain atmospheres or conveying specific sensibilities. Her myriad of sources range from geological field research to biomedical data, and the included objects are not meant to coalesce in one coherent narrative; on the contrary, through these works, Mackie explores the basic meaning of each object and demonstrates that its significance is both malleable and largely dependent on its shifting relationships to other objects.
Mackie’s constructions moreover are notable for their impermanence. Placed together in a highly intuitive manner, these groupings are principally the fruits of balance and gravity, as opposed to glue and other connective materials. In this way, Mackie’s delicate assemblages convey a sense of ephemerality, suggesting they might easily be deconstructed and subsequently reworked.
Mackie has been the subject …
Artist Christina Mackie works in a variety of media, including but not limited to video, photography, sculpture, and drawing. Through these various mediums, Mackie produces dynamic, meditative works of art that are largely concerned with themes of materiality, socio-politics, and the natural world. Mackie is best known for her multi-layered sculptural installations, which she refers to as emotional landscapes. Within these works, Mackie fuses disparate objects—tree trunks, crystal balls, and wooden slats, among other items—with the aim of creating certain atmospheres or conveying specific sensibilities. Her myriad of sources range from geological field research to biomedical data, and the included objects are not meant to coalesce in one coherent narrative; on the contrary, through these works, Mackie explores the basic meaning of each object and demonstrates that its significance is both malleable and largely dependent on its shifting relationships to other objects.
Mackie’s constructions moreover are notable for their impermanence. Placed together in a highly intuitive manner, these groupings are principally the fruits of balance and gravity, as opposed to glue and other connective materials. In this way, Mackie’s delicate assemblages convey a sense of ephemerality, suggesting they might easily be deconstructed and subsequently reworked.
Mackie has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Nottingham Castle Museum, Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, and Tate Britian’s Art Now Sculpture Court. Her work has also been featured in notable group exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, Tate Britain, and Kunstewerke in Berlin. Mackie won the Becks Futures Art Prize in 2005, and in 2011, she received the Oxford-Melbourne Fellowship and The Contemporary Art Society's Annual Award.
