Christina Mackie, Token 31 (2020), via Herald Street
On this month at London’s Herald Street, artist Christina Mackie exhibits a range of ceramic works and watercolors that showcase the artist’s multidisciplinary engagement with color and material. Combining a body of ceramic sculptures called Tokens and paintings titled Seaports, the show uses pigments, earthenware, slips, glazes, and an array of fabrics, to investigates the physical and chemical properties of her mediums, and simultaneously expose their emotional subtexts.
Christina Mackie (Installation View), via Herald Street
Mackie’s Seaports present a swirling tableau of rich color, delicate structures executed against ghostly white ground. Throughout, the works walk a fine line between abstraction and figuration, familiarity and distance, always emphasized by the fragile shapes and dense washes that dictate these works. Color is something of a physical structure here, negotiating space and form in a way that both sets up the canvas as a space with depth and dimensionality, while also establishing specific distinctions of the marks made as both layered and bound by time. These are works that emphasize their own construction, both in time and space. 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.
Christina Mackie, Seaport 15 (2023), via Herald Street
By contrast, the artist’s Tokens are vibrant and ceramic works mounted or suspended in air, physical structures that make a similar connection to the artist’s paintings, but turn that space towards a more meditative exploration of structure itself. These are equally works that meditate on location and time, material and energy as parts of the artist’s approach, the clay drawn for the works coming from a certain locality and space, while the work itself is now turned towards the abstract and distanced.
Christina Mackie (Installation View), via Herald Street
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.
The show closes September 16th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Herald Street [Exhibition Site]
