Catriona Jeffries

Goldsmiths CCA presents the first UK institutional solo exhibition by British artist Christina Mackie (b. 1956, UK) for over a decade. The exhibition celebrates Mackie’s contribution to British art, bringing new works to bear on paradigmatic pieces from the past fifteen years. Viewed collectively the exhibition highlights the dynamic interdisciplinarity, material investigations, and associative logic of her work across sculpture, painting, and installation, attuned to the geological, environmental, digital, and scientific modes of imaging and processing.

The exhibition features newly commissioned paintings alongside key sculptural works, such as Powder People (2018) previously unseen in the UK and originally commissioned for the Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti, Italy. It is restaged at Goldsmiths CCA in the Daskalopolous Tank Gallery, a metal-lined Victorian water tank converted into an exhibition space. Piles of curious materials are tumbling media for finishing and polishing manufactured parts. They represent in solid form the particles shown in procedural animations projected above. These animations are highly reduced forms which attempt to encapsulate ideas of process and control, procedure and rules. The starting point for the work is the knowledge that powder dynamics are used to model the behaviour of people in crowds. Extrapolated out to questions concerning the new uses of data, an environment of data mining, the accretion of information, and the agglomeration of information about individuals, to the impact on and loss of democratic process and the consequent breakdown in trust. People power seems an impossibly distant dream in an atomised society. 

The CCA’s Bridget Riley gallery hosts The Judges II (2011), on loan from the Arts Council Collection and which has not been seen in London since its first exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2012 as part of Painting the Weights, which consisted of interlocking sets of objects. The Judges unfolds across multiple trestle tables hosting objects that appear like evidence displayed for judgement; ceramics, minerals, watercolours, ink paintings and monitors. Their presentation provokes the question of which tools—forensic, artistic, geological—we use to judge and connect them. Minerals are present both in their innate form, and as pigment, slip, glaze and sand, metamorphosing across different media. Each trestle is handmade from red cedar or beech.

The work was made after Mackie visited an extinct volcano and grapples with the representation of time across geological spans and forces of pressure. Two video works, Fall Force, and Planet, interweave ideas of landscape, the formation of crystals, and their simulation through digital imagery. Planet used macro photography and computer-generated landscapes. In Fall Force, Mackie dwells on the idea that subterranean pipework is all that will remain of our civilization. With this in mind, she considers not just artworks, but all the paraphernalia of the studio as the fabric of life, which will eventually become dust. The video sequence shows objects falling and fragmenting.

The Clerestory Gallery hosts existing and new works, in which the region of Vancouver Island is central. Paintings in oil and watercolour draw on the immutability of the seascapes around her cabin to reflect on the digital world’s effect on our consciousness, which has become forever unrestful, soothed only by constant change. Seascapes, and a far-off marine port feature in new paintings; “A long lens brings far things near, making everything flat on the picture plane. Ships travel where and why, thoughts and people pass. The past recedes exponentially condensing into a field of light.”

Documentation by Rob Harris.