AMBIGUOUS ARTIFACTS

Take fire and water, earth and air, words and hands, and stir very quietly into a solution of brains and memories, being careful to savour the breakages and respect the cracks. Add beauty with restraint and render the dark things of today and yesterday after extracting them from the purely political. Ambiguous Artifacts is the result.

A domestic metaphor is appropriate because Mary MacKenzie makes art from a woman’s perspective, and because elements of skill in assembling and preparation are invisible in the end results. The performative ritual of material choices, manipulation of forms, applying marks, words, and images is deliberated in her small wooden studio. Her extensive reading and research take place in an eccentric, and dare I say charming, house that she built herself over the years in the spirit of the time, on Hornby island where she has lived for over 30 years. The drama of firing the forms unfolds with controlled danger in an ingenious raku kiln that she devised. All this happens beside a well tended working garden, an example of “the island way of life” that is envied, sometimes mocked, and frequently sentimentalised. Hers is a commitment to a way of doing things that is endangered by globalization’s tentacles embracing small communities, places where city folks from afar seek a healthy alternative for a few weeks respite each year.

The art world is as much affected by contemporary self doubt as any other professional field, and it is hard for artists generally to have faith in the things they know, the skills they have learnt or the values they have trusted. Control by corporations and the power of new technologies are currently widely debated issues, and many people, in various siituations, have been left with a sense of bewilderment and often despair. It actually requires courage to keep working as an artist far from the centres of perceived authority, and it takes confidence to do so in a way that might be perceived as having little contemporary currency. With the democratization that new technologies have brought, while there are many rewards for doing things quickly, visceral hands-on, or contemplative processes do not easily find value within professional art economies.

Mary Mackenzie has courage and confidence, and is one of those rare beings who are both practical and intellectual. Her studio practice reflects her engagement with community, demonstrated by, among many other things, a current project with plantings in drainage ditches to purify water. In her art work too she celebrates the local, and the immediate, without losing sight of bigger pictures. She draws with ease and thus, seeing this exhibition, mostly clay, but also paper clay, it would not be hard to call it something like “Concrete Drawings,” because the work refuses definitions. Clay forms are placed in museum-like frames many of which have themselves also been literally through the fire. Fired. The work strikes cords because there are historical references and visual quotations that are catalysts for memories lost, retrieved, transformed. Shards and fragments of words emerge - partially concealed within the forms. Inside out there are dark things held in these deceptive artefacts and some pieces refer specifically to the burning of the Alexandrian library by Caliph Omar in AD 642. We are reminded that regimes have always been threatened by books, for example, the more recent book burning by Nazi Germany in 1934, and the Apartheid book bannings in South Africa which made possession of certain books a criminal offence.

With methodology that she learned on archealogical excavation sites this artist digs out books from libraries and reformats their souls in her studio. She knows our histories and fuses the cultural traditions of Europe with the essences of African civilizations. Born in Africa, Mary MacKenzie cherishes the light, the sounds and the smells of those earliest memories. The shades that haunt a young girl inform these ambiguous objects, and, tool-like, they look as if they could have spent thousands of years buried. This conceptual illusion is achieved through exacting control of material and process in the hands of someone who was trained as a formalist. She understands the interactions of surface with surface, joins with joins, gaps with solids, so that the work, while invoking the past, is fresh, and does not proclaim a particular medium or genre. Simultaneously familiar and strange, each piece resonates with structural clues in which the vurtuosity of execution shifts attention from how they were made. The artist’s sifting and editing of ideas takes place in a private and highly controlled process which, in this case, invites chance and accident. Interactions between the maker and the material are sometimes in step and sometimes at variance. The variance, the cracks, the breaks, the faults, and the tensions are personal, but beautifully overflow their public boundaries. Material details intersect the present and past taking the local beyond borders of time and place, and confounding art’s tired old classifications. Mary Mackenzie’s engagement with craftsmanship and with her humanitarian beliefs celebrates the best of civilizations that have come and gone, while she mourns the uncivilized things that still go on. She gets burned up - mad as hell - and her work often is ignited by outrage at the plight of others. Take fire, water, earth, air, and from this corner of a quiet island comes a disturbing beauty that is by no means insular.