Christina Mackie

Herald St is delighted to present an exhibition of works by Christina Mackie, taking place in the gallery’s East London premises. The presentation features a continuation of Mackie’s ceramic wall sculptures titled Tokens, as well as a new series of watercolours inspired by modern container terminals, titled Seaports. These distinct bodies of work demonstrate the artist’s multidisciplinary engagement with colour and material, which began over four decades ago. Through pigments, earthenware, slips, glazes, and an array of fabrics, she investigates the physical and chemical properties of her mediums, and simultaneously exposes their arresting emotive impact.

The exhibition debuts Mackie’s new paintings, her largest watercolours to date. In these tableaux, inky swathes of deep colour envelope delicate structures which emerge in ghostly white. Straddling the line between visual likeness and abstraction, the opalescent shapes capture the essence of loading cranes viewed from the artist’s home by the river deltas of Vancouver. Within this scene, the sharp geometries of electric machinery and yellow goods rise against misty wetland fogs, embodying a dichotomy of artifice and nature inherent in her practice. Born in England, Mackie was raised in Canada in a family of marine biologists, and her early exposure to scientific methodology has informed her artistic output. In describing the compositions of her Seaports, she meticulously lists their chroma and nomenclature: raw sienna, burnt umber, cobalt violet, manganese, gamboge, ultramarine, Payne’s grey, indigo, viridian. She draws attention to the physicality of colour within her work, with pigments mostly derived from earthy and mineral compounds – as notably explored in her monumental installation for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2015. At the same time, the watercolours are borne from intuitive gesture open to uncontrollable puddles and splashes of wet paint. Mackie’s Seaports also nod to their canonical genre, a contemporary answer to Dutch marine paintings of the seventeenth century. Loaded with nostalgia, her renderings continue the endlessly captivating tensions between human innovations and the majesty of nature.

Mackie’s Tokens are vibrant and haptic ceramics mounted on the wall or gently suspended on thick loops of velvet, cotton, and other materials. In conceiving these sculptures, the artist looked to objects and concepts which stand in for an outside idea, emotion, or relationship – a symbolic emblem often belying insincerity. Her inspirations ranged from the aesthetics of seals, badges, and medals to markers and behaviours in contemporary society: social media ‘likes’, endorsements, and virtue signalling. As with the watercolour pigments, the clay and glazes are extracted from the earth and inextricably linked to a particular geography, and these elemental mediums are juxtaposed with manmade fabrics which act as embellishments and hanging mechanisms. Fired to alchemical effect, her process is at once reminiscent of laboratory procedures and left to the fortuitous effects of the material’s crystallisation in the kiln. The sculptures recall Mackie’s series of Judges, anchored by clay shapes formed by chance which took on anthropomorphic and oppressive qualities. Her statement at the time of creating this seminal earlier work, over ten years ago, could still apply for the Tokens: ‘I do use materials that I consider to be beautiful or elegant but the work is dark. The real shape of the world we’re living in is what a lot of the work is about.'

Mackie’s Seaports and Tokens are immediately beguiling, executed in jewel tones, calligraphic washes, and glistening glazes. Both series are built on layers: physical stacks of thin plates of clay and pools of pigments, and conceptual interplays of motives and histories. The artist compares such complexities in her works to the layers found in other mediums such as softwares and films, as well as the inevitable layers of existence. The Seaports and Tokens carry microcosms of gestures from life, filled with the tensions of nature against artifice, intention against chance, and the scientific-objective against sentimental intuition.

—Émilie Streiff