Projected Outcomes is an exhibition of Alastair and Fleur Mackie’s collaborative practice, presenting their quietly methodic and lyrical approach to art making.
Featured works draw on a relationship to the landscape, particularly the immediate surroundings of the North Cornwall coastline where the artists have lived since 2011.
Devon and Cornwall's beaches and shoreline are subject to real world tensions between sustainability and economic exploitation. Equally, they are spaces where imagination, myth, and personal experience all fold into each other. The artists’ recent body of work looks to the coast as a place of ecological precarity, rooted in these long histories of industrial extraction and the commodification of leisure.
Exploring the marginal and unseen spaces of the coast, Alastair and Fleur gather natural and industrial materials which they transform into objects that hover on the edges of perception. Each artwork speaks to the circumstances of its origin, sparking connections across time and space. Materials include cuttlebone, derelict fishing gear and sub-fossilised oak. These dislocated fragments wash up on the tide and highlight the extent to which we find ourselves at odds with the natural environment, echoing the tensions and contradictions of what the coast means to us today.
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22 George Place, Plymouth PL1 3NY
karst.org.uk @karstgallery
SELECTED WORKS
One Mile Line (2024) is made of monofilament fishing line recovered from the Atlantic shoreline in tangled clumps. It has been carefully unknotted by hand, straightened, and then meticulously re-knotted to create a new singular line measuring one mile in length. Displayed on a frame and appearing as a circuit, it echoes the cyclical nature of the artists’ practice.
This sense of reconfiguration is also seen in Mount’s Bay Stool (2022), a simple wooden stool constructed from a piece of sub-fossilised oak. Once part of an ancient forest submerged by the rising Atlantic Ocean, the wood was preserved in oxygen-free peat and buried under sand. It lay undisturbed for over four thousand years before resurfacing after a storm in 2020.
4 Stacks (2024) is a series of photographic prints documenting temporary sculptures made from deep sea trawl floats. Fifty-one floats were recovered from a two-mile stretch of shoreline, found lodged in remote caves and cliff crevasses, exposed only at the furthest reach of the tide. Reassembled on site, they were stacked into incongruous vertical forms that briefly asserted themselves against the landscape before being returned to the studio.
The two panels of Complex System 157 & 158 (2025) are made from cuttlebone, the soft internal shell of cuttlefish that regularly wash up on beaches. Three hundred and fifteen cuttlebones have been processed into standardised geometric components. Arranged into an interlocking network of repeating forms, each part contributes to a greater structural unity. For their presentation at KARST, the artists use cuttlebone sourced commercially as a by-product of the human food chain. This version of the material reflects a different kind of ecology - one where the boundaries between natural and industrial systems are blurred.
Alastair and Fleur Mackie say:
The works presented in Projected Outcomes extend threads that run through our broader practice, but they’ve also drawn us into a more intimate relationship with this very particular space — where land meets sea. That closeness, in turn, drew our gaze outward across the water, toward a sense of the wider systems that shape us.
The coast, where we live, has evolved through the long pace of geological time, but also through the push and pull of contemporary life in a working landscape, as its communities adapt to economic and ecological pressures. These works arise from that context, but speak more broadly to the idea of unstable ground: of systems under strain, and our shifting relationship to the natural world.
2/3 22 George Place, Plymouth PL1 3NY
karst.org.uk @karstgalleryWe’re excited to be showing these works at KARST. The stripped back quality of the space mirrors our approach to making, while Plymouth’s layered maritime history offers a resonant backdrop for these conversations.
Join us for the opening event on 29 May (6 – 8pm). Alastair and Fleur Mackie will be in conversation with KARST’s Head of Programme, Ben Borthwick, on 12 July (12-1pm). Curator’s Tours for Projected Outcomes will be on 20 June and 25 July (1 – 2pm).
Gallery Open during exhibitions Weds – Sat 11am-5pm FREE ENTRY
About the artists
Alastair and Fleur (b. 1977, UK & Cameroon) met at art school in London in the late ’90s, and over time their work has evolved into a close collaboration. In 2011, they moved to North Cornwall, the landscape of which has played a central part in shaping their vocabulary.
Alastair and Fleur have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, including shows at the Busan Museum of Modern Art and the Reykjavik Art Museum. They have worked on a number of public commissions, and their work is held in collections including The Eres Foundation in Munich and the Wellcome Collection in London.