Autumn in A
It’s the title of one of the paintings. ‘What’s with the A’, I asked Fiona Mackay. ‘It doesn’t matter, whatever you want it to be.’
Fiona Mackay’s new show Tourist is now exhibited in gallery Martin van Zomeren. Before she took a flight to Scotland to spend the Holidays with family and friends, she gave me a tour. From a cold dark winter afternoon, I stepped into a bright ‘pop’ coloured world. It proved to be the first of many contradictions in the work of Mackay.
In two months she was working on around fifty canvases. Only eight have made it to the exhibition. ‘That’s how I work, I produce a lot of waste’, she says smiling. ‘It’s a never ending story.’ The deadline finally stops her producing more for the series she is working on. Still it never finishes. Basically, she almost always makes new work for an upcoming exhibition and her last series are the beginning of the next, even though they might look very different.
In the beginning of her career as an artist she was more focused on making installations. The flat surface of a canvas was for her too difficult to get to, to grasp somehow. At a certain point she got it. And now she works with fabric dye on canvas which brings layers on the canvas without actually making layers as you can still see the structure of the canvas.
For Tourist she wanted to make something very bright, something more close to summer then to winter. She obviously had the tourist as her starting point.
While reading the press release it feels you are reading a scene from someone’s travel journey, very poetically written. It’s not an ordinary press release; it’s a fundamental part of the exhibition.
Mackay explains that she is always very strict with her press releases. She asked the artist Andreas Arndt to write it in collaboration with the gallery and the titles of the paintings are incorporated in the press release. It says for instance: ‘Touring during the autumn in a country I don’t know, I learn to know the inner field, being what others call a tourist among other tourists, I fill out the land.’
The titles and the press release bring an extra layer to the work. You could see them as signs, which help you to read the paintings, she explains. For Mackay it’s important that the audience is capable of reading her work, not necessarily in the way she sees it, as for her the paintings are very obvious and figurative although they are quite abstract. You should look at a painting without realising it is one.
There is no narrative or order in the series. The paintings work as associations and you may need one painting to understand another one. Still they are all equal. That’s also how it feels like while you enter the space. Mackay always visits an exhibition space before to get to know the architecture. She has to know how big her paintings can be and be sure that the arrangement will be right, so no single one will overrule the others.
Although one can find different layers in Mackay’s work, the paintings themselves are very light. The combination of the colours and the material are pleasant as if you experience the improvidence of the tourist itself. She shows a tourist perspective without telling you what that tourist perspective is. She takes you with on her journey, but you decide where you go.
Fiona Mackay
Gallery Martin van Zomeren
t/m January 4, 2014
Pam Roos ten Barge