Christina Mackie
Christina Mackie (b. 1956, Oxford, England; lives/works: London, England) trained as a painter, but over the past four decades she has undertaken an exploration of colour and perception through a range of media, including sculpture, watercolour, photography, ceramics and found materials. Mackie's recent work centres on installations, borne out of her research into materials and forms which facilitate different forms of change, exchange or transaction. For People Powder (2018), a site-specific commission installed in the Church of Francesco in Como, Mackie sited sculptural piles of tumbling medium, small pieces of colourful monochromatic plastic used as high-tech industrial cleaning materials, in a vaulted room, and projected a series of digital animations, on the building's interior archways; the exhibition took its title from a term for optimization of the flow of bodies through public spaces, and the animations substituted the same forms of tumbling medium for flows of people. In 2015, she installed her second presentation at Tate Britain, a site-specific commission titled the filters, which comprised multiple sculptural elements, including nine 12-metre high nets which Mackie sewed in her studio, then dip-dyed in the museum's Neoclassical Duveen galleries, leaving the pools of dissolving colour as pedestals for the resulting atmospheric and immersive installation, activated by natural light.
In the 1970s, Mackie studied at the Vancouver School of Art and Saint Martin's School of Art, London, and was Professor of Research at CCA Kitakyushu in Japan. She received the Annual Award from the Contemporary Art Society, London, and in 2010, received both an Award for Artists from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London, as well as an Oxford-Melbourne Fellowship from Arts Council England. She won Beck's Futures at the ICA London in 2005.
Recent solo exhibitions include Hospitalfield, Angus, Scotland (2021); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2019); Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti, Como (2018); Tate Britain, London (2015); PRAXES, Berlin (2014); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014); Nottingham Castle (2013); Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2012); Sculpture Court, Tate Britain, London (2007); and City Racing, London (1998). Her work has been included in numerous group shows, including Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2021); Galleria Spazia, Bologna (2020); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2017); Kinman Gallery, London (2016); Tate Liverpool (2015); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2010); Nomas Foundation, Rome (2010); The Approach, London (2006); VM Gallery, Karachi (2006); and Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2004).