Projected Outcomes: Cornwall-based Couple present Collaborative Artwork at KARST
Community Reporter, Jessica Warby, interviewed Alistair and Fleur Mackie about their exhibition, Projected Outcomes, at KARST Gallery. They gave insight into the themes, processes, and inspiration behind the artwork that is currently on display.
Alistair and Fleur Mackie live and work in rural Cornwall, where their work draws its inspiration from the surrounding landscape. The couple met at the City & Guilds of London Art School in the late nineties, Fleur studying illustration and Alistair studying fine art, specialising in sculpture. Despite working independently, they often found their work blended with their relationship. When they had their daughter and began to focus on raising her, Fleur would often aid Alistair with his commissions. As their daughter grew older, this turned into the official collaboration that can be seen in Projected Outcomes.
Alastair and Fleur Mackie, courtesy of KARST
It is evident within the exhibition that the artists have a passion for the wilderness of rural Cornwall and the objects that can be found in the environment where they live and where Alistair grew up on a Cornish farm. Fleur’s background jumps between Cameroon, England, and France. They say their backgrounds likely contribute to their love for the outdoors and describe the coast as a magnet. A favourite part of their process is being out in the elements, and finding materials there. Alistair equates this passion to the rise in popularity of cold water swimming, which they have realised is an increasingly popular pastime in Plymouth.
They laugh and point out that people often question how they successfully make collaborative work as a couple, but their collaboration produces better results than working alone. There is constant communication, whether in idea generation or in the physical creation. “We’re there, observing and absorbing together, and so the idea with this project was that we would let the doing inform what might come as an artwork. So that obviously was a totally shared experience.”
Photo Dom Moore
The striking photographic prints that appear when you first enter the exhibition have been shaped by the coastline around where they live. “We've physically landed very close to the edge and that's really fed into the work.” They like to walk as far off-piste as they can go, and this resulted in documenting the less accessible parts of the coast and finding the spherical objects that can be seen threaded onto a pole that maintains the precarious stacked appearance in the series of 4 photographs called Four Stacks: Stack 2, Stack 4, Stack 3, and Stack 1, 2024. These stacks are made from trawler floats that have detached from big industrial fishing nets, which are significantly damaging ocean floor beds and contributing to overfishing. Many of these floats, the couple have known about for three to four years and within a 1.8 mile stretch of land, they found fifty-one of these floats. The stacks in the images are located in the land where the floats were found. “As far as we like to see it poetically, it's a reconfiguration of what's already there.”
The theme of shape-shifting and threading in their work extends to the first image you see in the show, With The Past On The Left And The Future On The Right, 2023. The threaded limpets in the image are strung onto the rockface, which would have once sustained them. This idea came from the realisation that the way in which the limpets decay creates a ring. They may have seen them used as homemade house decorations or a mock-up necklace for their daughter before the idea turned into this piece.
One Mile Line, 2024, A monofilament art piece is representative of an environmentally horrible material. The act of tying it back together, having found the pieces separated, gives it an element of tongue-in-cheek playfulness that can be seen in so many of their pieces. The cuttlebone in Complex System 157 & 158, 2025, is also a waste product, albeit a more organic one. This internal shell of the cuttlefish is arranged in a geometric pattern and was sourced as a byproduct of the food chain.
Mount’s Bay’s Stool, 2022 starkly opposes KARST’s white walls with its dark fossilised wood. The piece started in a now-defunct project with a larger organisation that the couple got too invested in to discontinue. They ended up in conversations with The Cornwall Geoconservation Group to continue it. One day, they received a call from the late Frank Howie (who had intensely studied the geology of Mount’s Bay) to head down and see the piece of wood that had washed up. Removing natural objects from the coastline is generally discouraged, but as it was washed up, not part of the ground, and could be used in an art piece, they were given special permission to utilise the fossilised wood.
It made sense for them to use it for contemplation, inspired by the benches placed in areas of known beauty around Mount’s Bay. Challenges came when there was a realisation that the piece of wood had a 92% water content, whereas wood for furniture generally needs 13%. Once they had dried the wood, the usable material allowed them to produce the stool seen in the show.
A Liminal Place, 2024, the video piece by Tim Laing was a collaboration that started when they saw the filmmaker’s work that documents artist’s process and felt that it would enhance their work. Tim was able to show the landscape, finding, and utilisation of the materials behind the four stacks. Sharing and being more generous with the viewer’s knowledge of how the work is created and the beautiful spaces that inspire it is important to Alistair and Fleur. They say that their collaboration with Tim has now become really important for how they work.
Plymouth made sense to the artists as a location for their art to be shown as it remains in the context of the coast in Britain’s Ocean City. It works for the pieces to be displayed in KARST, as it is a gallery so close to the coast as a theme that runs throughout their artwork. The beaches and coastline shown in the exhibition are difficult to access due to shifting tides and rocky access routes. Projected Outcomes brings the beautiful, but less accessible parts of our British coast onto our doorstep.
Image: Dom Moore
When asked if Alistair and Fleur are environmental activism-based artists, they believe that the answer is more complicated than yes or no. They use the environment to inform their art, so people can take what they find as a sign of the crisis going on beyond their work. The couple recognise that their art can be both playful and have darker elements with aesthetic and meditative qualities, channelled through the materials. The couple “hope that the exhibition leaves people with a thought or idea they hadn't considered before - something that lingers in their mind and prompts further reflection.”
The show continues until 26th July 2025.
In Conversation between Alastair and Fleur Mackie and KARST’s Head of Programme, Ben Borthwick will be on 12th July 2025 at 12-1pm. The Curator’s Tours for Projected Outcomes will be on 25th July at 1-2pm. More information can be found on KARST’s website.
https://karst.org.uk/exhibitions/projected-outcomes/
Instagram: @alastairandfleurmackie @karstgallery
