Tom Mackie, Portals, Online catalogue

There are dual forces at work in Mackie’s practice, distinct yet complementary. The first is an archival impulse: a desire to arrest the transient nature of things, materials charged with traces of former affect. Like the ‘ghost print’ gleaned from the backing board of a Robin White screenprint, ‘This is me at Kaitangata’ (1979). This unassuming yet spectral fragment carries familial significance for the artist, whose ancestors’ legacies can be found in the built environment of Kaitangata, South Otago. The previously hidden backing board appears as though burned with the afterimage of the print it once supported, one of forty unique editions of White’s 1979 screenprint. Attention to these minor details leads Mackie to gently excavate the latent histories embedded in found objects, integrating their perceived flaws or obsolescence into each relief sculpture.

The second tendency is anti-gestural. Seeking a visual language that challenges conventional modes of perception and encounter, Mackie employs refined surfaces and highly controlled forms that suppress evidence of the artist’s hand. Linear and smooth, his carved and hand-turned surfaces give way to the organic properties of timber, while polished brass takes the place of mat board in Portals (2026)—a meditation on material culture’s shift from Victorian-inflected sentimentality towards the objective, self-effacing ethos of the modernist grid. The productive tension between these tendencies, at once nostalgic and removed, places Mackie’s practice beyond easy categorisation. Neither overtly expressive nor purely abstract, it holds a place in which material memory and formal restraint coalesce, allowing historical layers to assume renewed significance. 

In previous series, Mackie has sourced and framed the reverse sides of discarded canvases, taking an interest in the build-up or “collateral” that typically sits outside of objects, obscured from view. Their solid timber frames dominate the visual field, ornamented with spheres that echo the bobbin-turned furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement. In foregrounding craftsmanship and the accumulated lives of each material, the works resist the flattening effects of mechanical and digital reproduction.

These techniques shift in Portals as new elements enter the fold. Mackie’s surfaces are smooth, but not the kind associated with the unheimlich contours of AI graphics or automated production—the end-products of invisible processes from which we are alienated. Rather, his characteristically polished finishes evince a process of laboured unearthing; of dialling in to a material’s former lives and laying bare what resides within. In one piece, the surface of a former coffee table serves as both frame and subject, its appearance lightly haunted by a UV-stain left in the wake of a photo album. At its centre is a lucid, spiraling woodgrain that serves as an index of the material’s earliest incarnation as living organism. The cross-sectioned growth rings ripple outwards and exceed the limits of the surface, wrapping around the framed and embellished edges of the work. For Mackie, subject matter is secondary; our attention is gently escorted towards the periphery.

This emphasis on the border of a work is not an unusual strategy for the artist. Here, the formal inversion of interior and exterior—and of museological practices more broadly—is a means to complicate our increasingly passive modes of consumption. His practice takes a critical stance towards what art historian Jonathan Crary defines as a contemporary reconfiguration of sensory experience: ‘All of us in the present-day [...] inhabit a shifting mix of new and old perceptual modalities, of hybrid zones composed of Euclidean space and dimensionless experiences of electronic networks that often appear to be seamlessly connected.’^[1] Such hybridised zones of perception are leveraged throughout Portals as viewers’ expectations are playfully thwarted. Like photographs that steal moments in time, hard timber frames immortalise the elusive folds of a garment or curtain, realising what Mackie terms ‘haptic dissonance’; a disruption of the perceptual hierarchies of embodied touch and the associative powers of sight.

Taking this strategy of inversion from the sensory realm to the conceptual, the boundaries of each work are collapsed through a reversal of intrinsic and extrinsic value. Whereas conventional frames may be thought to insulate a work from the scaffolding of a gallery’s walls (and by extension, its wider institutional apparatus), the works in this exhibition make no such distinction. The voids or windows at their centre are ‘emptied out in order to distract from themselves’, a challenge that brings to mind Malevich’s secular corner icons, or Derrida’s view of the parergon—Kant’s characterisation of a work’s frame, which he argued was an extraneous accessory or supplement to the ergon, the work of art—as something that exists neither wholly within or without a work of art, capable of upsetting fixed, stable distinctions between artwork and contextual ground.^[2] Mackie’s hand-carved frames pose an even greater challenge to Kant’s parergon; that the work itself could be composed entirely of frame—all periphery with no core.

Nina Dyer