Artist Christina Mackie on Canada, Central Saint Martins and her new exhibition at Tate Britain

Artist Christina Mackie is playing wizard in her new installation at Tate Britain, she tells Ben Luke, turning the central galleries into a lab for magical experiments with colour
Pigment power: Christina Mackie prepares for her show at Tate Britain (Picture: Adrian Lourie)
Adrian Lourie
Ben Luke19 March 2015

For Christina Mackie’s new commission at Tate Britain, she’s turned the grand central space of the Duveen Galleries into a giant studio. As I walk in, there are richly coloured powdered pigments in jars on a table, swatches of coloured textiles, a big vat of liquid, and resin pools shaped like giant lily pads, some of them filled with dark, reflective liquid dye.

Above the pools are finely woven silk and linen nets, 12 metres long, hung from rings close to the ceiling. Some of the nets have been lowered by ropes and dipped into the vats of dye before being quickly raised again, so they now glow with beautiful, bright colour and taper elegantly into the pools.

This dramatic artwork being born at the heart of the Tate is part of The Filters, Mackie’s biggest ever show for a UK gallery. The British artist, who grew up in Canada, has steadily become an important figure on the London and international art scenes, showing regularly both here and abroad. But The Filters is her most high-profile show yet, and she’s seizing the opportunity with both hands.

Mackie has taken residence in the galleries for a few weeks because all the decisions about colour and composition are being made on site. There are nine of the nets, and each will be a different hue.

As we sit at a table surrounded by the powdered pigments, Mackie, who speaks with a gentle Canadian lilt, tells me about the “delicious tension” in making her colour decisions. “It’s quite fun, I enjoy the options closing, so that there are fewer choices possible the more things that you put there,” she says. While she chooses her words carefully, she is clearly excited — infectiously so — about the work taking shape in front of us. “It’s sculpture because you go up and you look at it,” she says, but also “it’s like painting, but it’s entered the world”. She likens the movement of the textiles as they are dipped into the pools and lifted up to a paintbrush being lifted off paper.

The nets are made painstakingly by hand by former students of Mackie, who also teaches. “They’ve taken months to make, but they’re coloured with one gesture. So it’s a kind of weird mixture.” It must be nerve-wracking, I say. “It’s irreversible, but that’s what’s nice about it,” she says with a smile. “The balance is fun to play with, but to have a lot of risk is also really fun.”

A bit dippy: Mackie's installation that features nets dipped in pools of dye

In the neighbouring space, the Octagon, lies a completely different sculpture, which Mackie calls The Yellow Machines. This is reminiscent of the contraptions you might find in the Science Museum, with a yellow metal frame, clear plastic tubes, a big yellow ball, copper sieves, and smaller versions of the silk nets attached to little resin weights with coloured liquid trapped in them. It’s deliberately strange and enigmatic. “What is it filtering out? Is it here to get something or take something? Is it us? What’s it after?” Mackie asks.

Although they’re very different in their materials, at the core of both works — and in a third sculpture using seductive chunks of cullet, the opaque residue of stained glass windows — is colour. It’s a subject that, however much it is analysed, maintains a transcendent, magical quality. “Like everybody else, I like to wonder about it,” Mackie says. “Refining colour, making colour, and having it as a thing you could use must have been one of our earliest technologies. But I think, because it was precious, it must have been used for magical purposes — it’s an agent of transformation.”

She’s also fascinated by the optics of colour, by “how we perceive light”, she explains. “The cones in our eyes filter light into colour, and give meaning. So there’s also the idea that these nets are cones... It’s not a representation or a picture of that, but it’s playing with it.” Though she says she is “not a very scientific person”, many of her installations, just like the Tate Britain show, have the feel of a laboratory or the stage for an experiment.

And science is in her blood, as both her parents were marine biologists. “I guess I grew up around the excitement of science,” she recalls. The family spent their summers at marine labs.

She remembers “crazy experiments”, including one concerning plankton, which involved breakfast cereals in a tank of water. “It was nice that I was surrounded by people who liked learning,” she says. “Maybe I was attuned to it, but I think science and art, and beauty and wonder, are all the same thing. Science and art are just ways of trying to understand the world.”

Much of that wonder emerged in her childhood in Canada — she was the second of five children. Her earlier years there, in Edmonton, with its “10 months of snow”, were a “magic” experience that she describes in sculptural terms: “You would get these days where the top of the snow sparkles — it melts just enough to make tiny ice crystals all over the top of it.

“You get all these phenomena, and you can play — you can do a lot of stuff with snow, you can roll it up and pile it up, you can draw in it.”

In terms of art, her early inspirations were the Canadian painter Emily Carr and the Native American art on the West Coast, where she lived from the age of 12. “It was an incredibly strong, graphic, amazing art. It was everywhere, it was the real dominant influence on me until I got to art school.”

But she never really made much art in Canada. She came to London on a scholarship from her forward-thinking art school in Vancouver in 1976, and never left. She now lives in the East End, in the same house for 27 years, with her partner Chris.

When she first arrived here, she went to Central Saint Martins art school when it was at the heart of the punk scene, although she remembers the artistic scene much more. It was still very much under the influence of Anthony Caro’s tutorship with heavy-metal sculpture the dominant form — “there was still a lot of welding”, she remembers.

But this macho moment for art played to her advantage, she feels. “I think it must have been weird for men — there was a lineage, there were always the important male artists and they follow each other and they’re like a father and son. Whereas for women, because there’s no space in there, it’s total freedom.”

Now, 30 years on, and turning 60 next year, she is reaping the rewards that freedom allowed her, as the richness and visual power of her Tate Britain works show. As we wander for a last time around the nets and lily pads, she explains that the pools of liquid will evaporate and the different pigments will dry differently.

“Some of them are like salt pans, some are crystalline, and some are more visceral.” The evaporation might take place a month or so after the show opens, but she’s not sure. “I don’t know what will happen,” she says. But I sense that Mackie, and Tate Britain’s visitors, will enjoy finding out.

The Filters is at Tate Britain, SW1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk), from Tuesday until October 18

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