Catherine Mackey

Instagram: @cathmackey415

Website: https://www.catherinemackey.com/

Bio: Catherine received a degree in Interior Architecture in the UK and subsequently worked on a variety of commercial projects, mostly in London. She also taught at Chelsea College of Art and Design as a full-time senior lecturer in Interior Architecture. She moved to the Bay Area 25 years ago to follow her dream of art-making and now works from a light-filled workspace in an old factory in the Mission district of San Francisco. Her creative practice includes painting, printmaking, and drawing. She has had several solo shows in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and New York, and has been involved in many group shows across the US. Re-engaging with the world of art-and-design education, Catherine recently gave a public talk about her work (with an associated solo show) at CSU Chico as part of the Hopper Visiting Artist Program. She is involved locally with fund-raising art events and for several years has been a juror for a major annual art auction to support the Alliance Health Project.

Statement: Since I began to make artwork my consistent line of inquiry has been an interest in the changes that structures go through once they are considered no longer useful. Most of them are abandoned, often going through periods of decay before finally disappearing through collapse or removal. It is in this transition stage that I see great moments of insight and beauty. It is also here that I find the imprints that people have left behind - the human story. While most of my work has looked at the urban environment my focus has recently widened to include agricultural structures, abandoned and dilapidated in their obsolescence as a result of changing agricultural processes. For many years my figure drawing has been a private practice, remaining separate from my more public paintings. But after studying the collapsing motions of different abandoned barns I began to notice a similarity with the movements of the human figure in precarious gesture poses which happen at the beginning of each drawing session. Finally my structures and my figures started to come together in an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability, ageing, and imminent absence. An important part of my creative process is the use of fragments of street posters, collected from cities all over the world. I incorporate these into my work as a reminder of people in cities far from mine, and the narrative layers they leave in our environments. The interaction between paint and poster collage holds a space for the stories of those who inhabited these places.