Christina Mackie
Herald St | 2 Herald St, London, E2 6JT
28th June – 16th September 2023
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Herald St is delighted to announce 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.
Token 24
2020
Earthenware, silk
30 x 37 x 5.5 cm / 11.8 x 14.6 x 2.2 in
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Token 45
2022
Earthenware, plastics, pigments, silk, paper
75.5 x 33 x 8.5 cm / 29.7 x 13 x 3.3 in
Token 44
2020
Earthenware, Egyptian paste, seeds, silk, glass
83 x 25 x 4.3 cm / 32.7 x 9.8 x 1.7 in