A Liminal Place | Alastair & Fleur Mackie
We have a responsibility toward this Earth to tread lightly. To take only what we need and give back where we can.
Alastair and Fleur Mackie’s shared artistic practice is a story of borrow and give-back. Constructed from painstakingly sourced and transformed site-specific objects, their works possess a cyclical quality; building a dialogue with the place they were found, sparking connections across time and presenting commentary on environmental change.
Complex System 123 & 124 2016 | Cuttlebone | 94 x 78 x 5cm framed (each part) | Cuttlebone collected from beaches and processed into components that conform to their underlying linear geometry, pieced together to create two opposing surfaces.
The artists were both born in 1977. Alastair grew up in a farming community in the south of Cornwall, while Fleur’s childhood was split between Cameroon, France and the UK. They met at art school in London in the late 90s and over time their work has evolved into a close collaboration. In 2011 they moved to North Cornwall, the landscape of which has played a central part in the shaping of their shared vocabulary.
STACK 1 2024 | Archival pigment print | 60 x 90cm | Fishing industry trawl floats recovered from shoreline, stacked, and documented in situ | Ongoing series
STACK 2 2024 | Archival pigment print | 60 x 90cm | Fishing industry trawl floats recovered from shoreline, stacked, and documented in situ | Ongoing series
Only minutes from their studio, the intertidal zone acts as their muse, their resource, their stage. The pair carefully gather flotsam and jetsam – natural and man-made – and turn it into balanced, meditative artworks over extended periods. Their current work in progress (below) is an exercise in extreme patience, with echoes of Walter De Maria. Nothing new is needed here, only dedication. So, the artists’ practice is an act of cleansing: the foreign bodies choking the local shoreline and coastal habitat are dislodged; letting the beach breathe, whilst simultaneously giving us – the viewer – a sense of both calm and quiet apprehension.
Work in progress (detail) 2024 | Monofilament, aluminium | Dimensions variable | Photo by Steve Tanner | Misplaced fishing line recovered from shoreline, unknotted, straightened, and re-knotted to form a new singular line, approximately 550 meters in length.
“We were lucky to find a former farm labourer’s cottage at the end of a lane, with a stone barn for a studio, and a five-minute walk across fields to the coast”, Alastair tells us. The barn had previously been used for storing corn cut from the surrounding fields. In stark contrast to their previous studio – an ex-industrial storage unit on Hackney Road in London – this was a familiar setting; both artists having been raised, albeit on different continents, in communities that worked with and lived off the land. Where once their barn-studio stored corn, today it stores artworks made from harvested debris, many of which act as symbols of our present day plight.
“What made this place distinct to us, though, was its immediate proximity to the open Atlantic. Coastal land is different. The air has a particular character: full of salt, minerals, and negative ions. The light is filtered in a way that differs from inland. And then there’s the edge – the narrow strip of ground where the land stops and the ocean begins.
This is a liminal place where the bones of the earth are exposed, void of anthropogenic development and full of wonder.
Fleur and I have always been drawn to the coast, yet our lives hadn’t previously been anchored there. The sea captivated us and, in 2013, we had our daughter who, from infancy, also developed a preoccupation with it. This made raising her easy. For us as a family, the farm’s coastal perimeter became a sanctuary, and our work followed us there.
Our work has lead to a growing awareness of a diverse landscape shaped by millions of years of geological processes: intricate patterns of tectonic deformation, mineralisation, and the preservation of ancient ecosystems through fossilisation – now the foundations for their ethereal present-day descendants. Access to these places is limited to the spring low tide, the giant tidal flow that occurs twice a month when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are aligned. All of it is perfectly indifferent to us.
Etched into these structures though, if you look closely, are the tempered impressions of distant human activity; a Bronze Age tumulus on high ground, and the more recent trace scars of mining and other forms of extraction on the shore. More recent again, and more apparent, is marine debris. This contrary modern human made material – the stuff of our time – covertly arrives on the tide and with the wind from elsewhere, and underscores the extent to which we find ourselves at odds with the natural environment.”
“The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one’s dreams, to all one’s speculations … The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm.”
A drift seed from the giant pea Entada gigas
“Other arrivals are biological. Amongst the great many fragments of plastic fishing floats siphoned by a particular rocky section, we find a sea heart: a drift seed from the giant pea, Entada gigas, which grows in the humid rainforests of Central and South America – a precious life-giving vessel that made a five thousand mile journey to us on the Gulf Stream.
The seed highlights the intricate web of relationships and interactions among the various bodies of saltwater on our planet; the interconnected systems that play a crucial role in shaping Earth’s climate, sustaining life, and influencing global processes.”
Mount’s Bay Stool 2022 | Sub fossilised oak (carbon-14 date 4400 to 4700 before present) | 48 x 38 x 38cm | Oak from a tree that died two and a half thousand years before the Common Era Changeover, at a time when the Great Pyramid of Giza and the standing stones of Stonehenge were being constructed. The tree lived in Mounts Bay, Cornwall, when the bay was wooded and far from the sea. It was pickled in peat, buried under sand, and submerged by the rising Atlantic Ocean for four and a half thousand years, until uncovered by a winter storm in 2020.
“E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis suggests an innate human tendency to seek connections with nature. It describes an inherent affinity for the natural world, driven by evolutionary processes and the long history of our species’ adaptation to the environments that sustain us.”
Images courtesy of the artists / Banner image by Tom Pearce | Text by Alastair & Fleur Mackie + A La Luz | Produced by A La Luz, 2024 | Please do not re-publish any of the above without prior written consent
