Alastair and Fleur Mackie’s artworks underline the dynamic processes at work in the universe that connect mankind with supernova.
Words by Martin Holman
When a star explodes into a bright supernova, a shock wave sends ripples through the fabric of the universe. That wave compresses into passing molecules of stardust, heavy chemical elements from the star’s surface, among them gold. In 2017 cameras penetrated deep space and photographed such a cataclysm and, maybe, helped solve the mystery of the metal’s origins on our planet.
Over millennia, particles of gold from meteorites sank to the Earth’s core, too deep and hot for any human to reach. But some rested on the crust. People found ways to mine them; but the difficulty involved still accounts for the great value mankind attaches to gold. The vast forces that propelled its journey into human hands fascinate two artists who have merged their practices into a single creative entity. In 2019, Alastair and Fleur Mackie set out to strike gold – not in South Africa or the Klondyke but in rural Cornwall.
The county is not traditionally associated with the rare, precious element. But recent archaeological research is revealing that south-west Britain experienced a prehistoric gold rush. Whereas large quantities of tin were being exported in early Bronze Age Cornwall, kilos of gold were also extracted from the sand and gravels of local rivers.
The Mackies’ aim, however, was not to create a haven for investment. After all, this was an artistic project with sights set elsewhere than on great wealth. Moreover, deposits in the headwaters 4,000 years ago would have been very much richer than now. Sufficient gold was mined to supply ancient craftsmen, and these artefacts survive today in museums in London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Truro. “Materials,” Alastair says, “are pre-loaded with significance when they come into our environment.” These artists’ work characteristically recycles what they find in nature, both organic and man-made. Their methods synthesise awareness of the vast systems and processes which transport those materials through time and distance into the formal properties of their objects, through the ideas and actions that bring them into being.
The results of often complex strategies, their graceful objects belie the formidable amount of toil required to create them. Labour, Alastair insists, is integral to the process: “It contributes to the energy we want our work to project. Some materials are physically demanding to work with, and the process itself becomes one of deep engagement, tying us to the landscape and the work to its timeline.”
LEFT - Complex System 123 & 124, 2016, Cuttlebone, 97 x 78 x 5cm each part framed Photograph by Ian Kingsnorth CENTRE - Alastair Mackie panning for gold, 2019 RIGHT - Complex System 123 (detail)
Repeated actions permeate the duo’s practice. Panning for gold is one example. After two months spent sifting gravel hour upon hour and day after day, the ground yielded 10 grams of gold. Compressed into a morsel smaller than a fingernail, a nugget resulted with a purity of 23.7 karats. What will it become? “We will reconfigure what we found,” Alastair says, “as our ancestors did, working material that existed in the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Man intervenes to continue its evolution towards beauty, value and function.”
Finding, extracting, selecting and reshaping are the unseen aspects of their activity. Most projects include this arduous, almost performative dimension; it is the end-product that reveals itself physically in dramatic fashion. In 2023 Fleur and Alastair installed a large oak stump at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens. What singles out this mass of wood from the park’s curated trees and shrubs is its incongruous type of display. Mounted on simple steel props sunk into a neat, rectilinear concrete platform, the contrast with its surroundings is stark. Its presence is curiously modified to stand out from rather than merge with its kin of natural forms.
The metal props are like giant fingers that, if they were our own, might hold a precious sample in a lab or turn a beautiful jewel in the light to appreciate its details. Time and growth are registered in folds and crevices within its tannin-rich tonality like evidence of centuries of patient development. Heartwood lies at the core of a tree: it is strong and durable, possessing the toughness of steel. Come upon by visitors near the top of the gardens, the exuberance of detail, deep colour, grandeur and surprise seem to share properties with the sculptures found in the open and covered expanses around it.
LEFT - Fleur Mackie at Tregardock Beach collecting trawl floats, 2023 CENTRE - Epitaph, 2014, Found boulder, off-cut material, canvas, frame, Dimensions variable
RIGHT - From This Day On, 2023, Oak, concrete, steel, 300 x 300 x 165, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens
The piece has the spirit of the Baroque, the florid historical style that emerged in the fine arts, decoration and architecture of the 17th century. Links to other art forms often stalk the artists’ transformations. They prepared the dried-out wood with water and sand blasting, then sealed the remaining material with a natural oil. Sitting elevated now above ground that once its roots penetrated for survival, the carcass of the tree exists in suspension between reality and fantasy. It would be at home in Versailles. Yet the Mackies have titled the piece From This Day On, a phrase which stresses its future rather than the past.
Living and working close to the north Cornwall coast since 2011, the pair’s surroundings play a part in their evolving way of working. “Time spent in the landscape is as important as our time in the studio.” Alastair knows that environment well, having been brought up on his parents’ 128-acre farm south-east of Bodmin. The rhythms of farming made an impression on him as a teenager, of sheep lambing in spring and harvest from late summer. From a highpoint he would watch neighbouring farms following the same patterns of activity as his home, manifesting cycles of cultivation so old they are embedded in instinct.
Fleur and Alastair walk on nearby beaches most days. Moving to a cottage near Tregardock gave them access to locations where all manner of materials wash through the tides with potential to become objects. They do not classify themselves as ‘environmental artists’ per-se, though they acknowledge the relevance of the term. Rather than explicitly issuing warnings about climate erosion, they believe the materials they work with can carry those messages inherently. “Other artists focus on telling that story, and we deeply respect and admire their work,” they explain. “Their art delivers vital messages. But for us, the warnings are already embedded in the materials themselves.”
LEFT - Mud Form, 2015, River Avon mud, 12 x 9 x 9cm Photograph by Artur Tixiliski
CENTRE - Mud Form, 2015, work in progress
RIGHT - The Well, 2013, Egg shells, wenge, steel, 172 x 57 x 57cmPhotograph by Ian Stewart
Instead, the pair’s task seems to be to continue those itinerant materials on their travels. They organise them, even rationalise them to connect their finds’ intrinsic properties with the human aesthetic sphere. “In a sense,” Alastair adds, “our intervention is an act of reciprocity.”
That was the case with floats separated from fishing nets. Washed into cracks and caves punctuating the cliffs behind Tregardock beach, this man-made, maritime detritus speckled the harsh, slate grey rocks with spots of colour. Perhaps it was that contrast that first drew the duo to collecting the abandoned globes. Fleur and Alastair took a lump hammer onto the beach, and an aluminium ladder to reach plastic lodged high in the cliff. Over the course of a year, they gathered 51 trawl floats as well as bags of unevenly shaped plastic shards.
But how to use them? Each piece was distinguished by a single synthetic colour – red, blue, white, yellow. Sizes also varied and within the serial attitude of Modernism, a cultural idiom that utilises elemental qualities of line, colour, repetition and surface, their sculptural potential was strong. The bright plastic jetsam, whole and in fragments, suggested lightness, movement and travel, even gaiety – blameless but invasive gatecrashers on nature.
The result was a series titled Four Stacks (2024). Floats were assembled into columns in rocky coves they had drifted into on tides. The vertical composition has no arcane colour coding; the order is as random as mankind can make it. Threaded onto a 2.6m pole in stainless steel, the stacks appear both in strange harmony with their surroundings and as disjointed presences. Like the tree at Tremenheere, they are both part and apart from their surroundings.
And they survive as photographs. High-definition images record an existence inseparable from the two-mile stretch between Tregardock and Barrett’s Zawn where they were found. Synthetic in form and colour, these Anthropocene presences mimic the rock stacks occurring naturally nearby.
So, the Mackies’ work resembles propositions. Like ripples in a pool from a dropped stone, thoughts radiate out of the objects and the situations that caused them like a chain reaction.
Compression is at the core of what they make: they break down in order to build up anew in some altered form. They once reduced a wall drawing made with River Avon mud in the New Art Gallery, Walsall, by the celebrated British conceptual artist Richard Long. After its exhibition, Fleur and Alastair washed away the composition with sponges. Then they filtered the muddy residue from the water and dried it into a stubby cylinder of soil, thereby returning the drawing to its constituent medium. In the process, they created a new conceptual artwork, a tantalisingly mute hypothesis about reuse and how nature’s cycles flow.
LEFT - One Mile Line, 2024, Monofilament, detailPhotograph by Steve Tanner RIGHT - One Mile Line, 2024, Monofilament, aluminium, 220 x 826 x 5cmPhotograph by Ian Kingsnorth
Both these artists had art school training. Since childhood, Alastair had been making objects on the farm so a career in art rather than agriculture was inevitable. At City and Guilds of London Art School in the late 1990s he searched out his own voice. Interest graduated from figurative sculpture onto a conceptual route, influenced by tutors like Amikam Toren and John Frankland, figures already well established in the capital’s progressive gallery scene. It was at City and Guilds that he met Fleur, an illustration student whose upbringing in Cameroon, France and Hampshire had also brought her close to nature and a keen sense of design.
Independent careers followed in London. Alastair sold work to Charles Saatchi and showed with Max Wigram, a dealer close to the “YBA” phenomenon symbolised by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Fleur’s illustrations appeared in books. But underlying those highpoints was the reality of the artist’s life; maintaining a home and studios with mundane commercial jobs left little time for creativity.
Both resolved to take a chance and dedicate themselves to their careers. For that, Cornwall was a more sympathetic setting and nurtured their growth as artists who often consulted each other. So, the couple merged their practices around 2016, formalising it three years later when gold entered their lives.
They work closely together. The making of One Mile Line (2024) had the couple teasing apart tiny knots in skeins of recreational fishing line that the currents tightly tangled. Sitting across from one another, Fleur would hand a length carefully unpicked from clumps of sea-twisted filament to Alastair, who pulled it through leather to straighten it out. And that happened over and over; after a few hours, they would switch roles.
Repetition is the heart of process. Processing finds collected from three coves, such as Greenaway Beach, through their hands, says Fleur, “helped us make sense of the material. Working like this binds us, in an intimate sense, to both the material and the landscape it comes from. How then to take it forward also becomes clearer.”
Having separated out scores of pieces of the strong plastic string, they reconstructed a longer line. In a mix of a system and chance that tied clear sections to variously coloured lengths, after twelve weeks of working eight hours each day, the total stretched to three metres over a mile. Why a mile? “We aimed for that: a nice, round number, a quantifiable space.”
To articulate that process visually, they devised a form of display, just as with the stump at Tremenheere. The line was threaded horizontally between six uprights, wall-mounted in pairs, into which pegs were placed at regular intervals. As the line was played out, it curled around each peg in a forward and back motion still sensed by looking at its entirety. The miniscule knots occur at regular intervals, like punctuation in writing. The alternation between colours of line implies another type of movement, like the intersecting sea currents that had filleted and filtered, twisted and tumbled the discarded lines into the unwieldy hanks the artists had picked up.
Circles, loops and lines constitute a visual language for the Mackies. In Untitled (sphere) 2010, a filigree of tiny mouse skulls is laboriously constructed from leftovers collected in barns where owls fed. When the artists intervene, an elegant form emerges from which thoughts about natural cycles of existence spill. Links and connections proliferate through the pairs thoughtful processing of the universe that draws the imagination back into the ways of the world. We are not a species apart from the ground where Alastair and Fleur panned the gravel. For the adult human body contains about 0.2 milligrams of gold.
All images and artworks © Alastair and Fleur Mackie.