untitled, plaster relief
Fiona Mackay | Homing
Fiona Mackay is a fine art practitioner in her third year at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland. Most of her work being influenced by the external world, her aim is to capture atmosphere or 'the sense of a place' without using words. She practices a variety of different mediums, from watercolour, acrylic, and printmaking to oils and most recently to plaster and glass sculptures. Fiona's creative influences are mostly environments: the fjords and wood cabins of Norway, farmland and coasts of southern England, the heather-covered hills of Scotland. But a few of her human influences would be the author Sophie Strand, the poet John O'Donogue and multidisciplinary artist Hanna Tulliki.
Is this piece similar to what you’ve made in the past? How do your materials reflect the place you were representing?
This piece is new and different for me, but most pieces made in art school are. I primarily paint in watercolour; this is my first real attempt at sculpture and is still very new to me. I came upon the process by experimenting with plaster and clay, which I’ve produced in a kind plaster relief print of a drawing etched into a clay slab. I felt like 3D mapmaking was the only way to truly honour the place I was depicting because it avoided flattening it, both literally and figuratively.
What about this piece means ‘homing’ to you?
As an artist, creating art is a crucial aspect of developing a connection with a place, particularly places that are unfamiliar to me. To me, ‘homing’ is the process of creating art about or within a particular place, as it allows me to look at elements of the place more deeply than I would have otherwise and to embed them in my memory.
This particular piece is of a farm by the south coast of England that I volunteered at in August. I stayed for two weeks, and since I was doing farm work in such a hands-on way, I feel I developed a deep connection to the place. For a little while, it was home to me. I wanted to memorialise my internal map of this place before it faded in my memory.
