Tracy Mackenna

Education

Tracy Mackenna studied at The Glasgow School of Art between 1981 and 1986, having studied Sculpture at Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels. On graduation, she moved to Budapest to study at The Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She is an academician of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture.

Career

Between 1986 and 1990, Mackenna worked and lived in Hungary. Exhibitions of her work were held in Hungary, France, Ireland and Scotland.

Returning to Glasgow, Mackenna was a founding director of Glasgow Sculpture Studios in 1988. She produced If Crocodiles flew on wings.... as an artist in residence at the Glasgow Garden Festival. She has lectured at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen.

Mackenna and Edwin Janssen create multidisciplinary works for exhibition with themes such as cultural identity, concepts of place, and life and death.

The artist Tracy Mackenna, working lately with the Dutch-born Edwin Janssen, has developed accessible participatory methods and displays varied interest in Scottish nationhood, as a visual distillation of the debates surrounding the Scottish people's notions of Scottishness.

Her affiliations include Governor of Hospitalfield Arts, Board of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Faculty of Fine Arts at The British School at Rome, Steering Group Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes and The Scottish Arts Council's Reference Group for National Policy for Public Art and Visual Arts Awards Panel.

Vagabond Flux [1]

Vagabond Flux consists of multiple white cardboard boxes based on the form of a cube. The box playfully refers to the ‘white cube’ identity of a conventional gallery yet with each new site that Vagabond Flux temporarily inhabits, the concept of the 'white cube' is turned on its head. The first presentation hosted Micromegas, the ongoing publishing project, edition and exhibition that Mackenna & Janssen curate. A series of posters by 7 artists and a designer, and a commissioned text, respond to Voltaire’s 1752 story of the same name.

Friendly Invasions 2034 [2]

Friendly invasions 2034 is a response to an invitation to celebrate 20 years of artconnexion.

In 1994, Tracy was the first artist to exhibit at artconnexion, with her exhibition Invasions Naturelles, before starting the Mackenna & Janssen collaborative practice with Edwin Janssen. Ten years on, together Mackenna & Janssen made Growth, Form & the Inevitability of Herself, commissioned by CCA Glasgow for the Entente Cordiale Centenary and produced and presented by artconnexion in Lille in 2004.

And a further ten years on again, in 2014 Friendly Invasions 2034 takes artconnexion’s history as one of its key sources. Starting with a blank canvas, the developing spatial display of visual material reveals aspects of artconnexion's mission which partly overlap with Mackenna & Janssen's own artistic concerns. A growing collage shows myriad art historical and cultural references and associations. The giant cardboard structure incorporates another in our ongoing series of public studios which they occupy whilst in Lille. When Mackenna & Janssen are elsewhere, they continue to produce material that is added to the collage with the assistance of artconnexion's intern, Sébastien Deltombe.

Erasmus the Clown [3]

The main inspiration for the installation Erasmus the Clown is the painting Clown (1940–41) by the Dutch artist Charley Toorop (1891 – 1955). The role of the clown in the video is performed by our son Erasmus (1999 -) who was born in Rotterdam and loves theatre and acting. It is also he who addresses the public in a letter that reveals the web of references that informed the making of Erasmus the Clown. An accompanying soundtrack plays independently throughout the gallery in which Erasmus the Clown is exhibited.

Now hanging in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands Toorop’s painting depicts a pensive clown filling almost the whole canvas, painted in red and yellow and white. The background shows Rotterdam in ruins, derived from a photograph by Eva Besnyö taken after the aerial bombardment of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe on 14 May 1940, during the German invasion of the Netherlands. The actual clown depicted in the painting was ‘Bumbo’, a circus performer who fled to Bergen (NL) where Toorop worked and lived with her sons.

Erasmus the Clown continues Mackenna & Janssen's interests in portraiture, the representation of conflict and the space between private and public, explored through a number of artworks and exhibition projects since 1997.

War as Ever! [4]

War as Ever! took as its starting point the Van Kittensteyn album, a collection of more than 500 prints and drawings dating from 1613 whose subject is the Eighty Years' War of 1568–1648, the war of Netherlands independence from Spain which led to the formation of the Dutch Republic. In the collection of the Atlas van Stolk (Museum Rotterdam), the album was compiled by Willem Luytsz van Kittensteyn of Delft and portrays in bloody reportage the lengthy series of battles; sieges, executions and plundering that dominated the Dutch war of independence against the Spanish.

Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen are interested in the relationship between conflict, looking and art. In War as Ever!, through visual reflection on images of war and violence they investigated the relationship between the Van Kittensteyn album and the contemporary role of the media in the representation of war and violence.

The exhibition project consisted of a double screen slide projection, performative actions, text posters, photographs, educational activities and a conference.

The Museum of Loss and Renewal: Loss Becomes Object [5]

The exhibition Loss becomes Object, the first part of The Museum of Loss and Renewal project, was launched at HICA with a series of talks. Paula McCormack, Director of Clinical and Education Services for The Highland Hospice talked about the work of the organisation; Emma Nicolson, Director of ATLAS, presented context-specific art practice; Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen discussed the development of The Museum of Loss and Renewal, and its central issues.

The first two manifestations of The Museum of Loss and Renewal, Loss Becomes Object and Object Becomes Subject, focus on the interrelationships between death, memory, material culture and recycling. During a prolonged period of engagement with The Highland Hospice charity shops and by working with artefacts donated to them, we are investigating issues recurrent in our work; the value and significance of objects, life and death, and artist-led curatorial practice. By looking at and re-presenting items such as clothes, music, videos, books and bric-a-brac as part of a process of re-cycling, we continue to question the value of ‘things’, and how these determine and reflect identities and histories. This inquiry follows on from work made in response to our own familial experiences of death, represented in work such as Life is Over! if you want it.

Galleries and museums

Her works have been shown in: