First Fridays is a monthly series of artists talks with some of Ireland’s leading visual arts practitioners. This series is entitled Beyond Development and is curated by Emma Houlihan. Emma will host discussion and dyanamic conversations that aim to bridge the gap between artists and communities; questioning the relevance of art practice today, the role of the artist and how artists make art matter.
Christine Mackey
Christine Mackey received a BA in Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin followed by a PhD from the University of Ulster, Belfast. She has received several awards including a Fulbright Creative Research Scholarship Award, USA. Selected solo exhibitions include Home Grown Housing, The Museum of English Rural Life, England, (2017); SEED MATTER Series of exhibitions at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Leitrim Sculpture Centre and The Butler Gallery, (2011 – 2012).
Christine’s current practice constitutes the complex investigation of the historical, political and biodynamical ecologies of plant life through the subject of the seed and the agency of plants. This approach cultivates relational, site-responsive works that looks to the smaller scale, land-based notions of nature, remembering ‘localized’ farms and small gardens, common lands and vegetal systems. Lost, forgotten or effaced, these subjects are transformed in pursuit of producing something new that articulates alternative histories of place, ecosystems and plant life.
Inter-disciplinary in approach, the drawings, archival and photographic images and texts, installations, public-sited interventions, temporary events and publications generated in this process build from a series of narrative structures based on an assemblage of key material including multiple sites of interest, archival intuitions and community integration.
