Madeline MacKay: Not Yet Earth

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Madeline Mackay, "Meat, Mud and Water III," 2017

screenprint on rag paper, 36" x 22.5"

Not Yet Earth examines the fluid boundaries between self, body and inanimate matter in the context of Mackay's own changing relationship with her body following illness. As it started to behave in ways that were damaging to her and that she had no control over, She had a visceral realization that her body was not the same thing as her self. She explores this conflicted relationship between the body as self and as other through performative interactions in which she creates structures and patterns with strips of discarded butcher’s meat.

Mackay works with meat because it occupies a space between body and inanimate matter. It is no longer animate but it has not broken down into earth. It is not a body and yet we attribute a similar potency to it that we would to a body and observe many of the same taboos around touching it. Through drawing, printmaking, photography and video MacKay digs deeper into the symbolism of her ritual interaction with the meat strands to reveal the dissonance, anxiety and confusion of existing in a body that does not fully belong to her.

Madeline Mackay is a Scottish visual artist and printmaker. She recently gained her MFA in printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada and received her BA (hons) in Fine Art from DJCAD, Dundee, in 2012. She has exhibited in juried, group and solo exhibitions at galleries and artist-run centres in the UK and Canada. Madeline has taught drawing and printmaking both at the University of Alberta and in Sambaa K’e, a community in Canada’s Northwest Territories where she was artist-in- residence in 2014.