Tim MacKenzie

“Currently I am a part time student on the MA CVA programme at FCA, exploring the concept of painting and it’s validity in a contemporary digital age.

As an artist born in New Zealand I have always had a strong notion to question whether I belong in a place and indeed whether any body does. I fully endorse Gauguin’s (and lately Hirst’s) core questions which all art should ask: Where do we come from? What are we?, Where are we going?

This for me has led onto the whole exploration of how mankind has interacted with the landscape and the resulting concept of land being viewed as“flesh” which has intern been cut into, scared and mutilated by the likes of quarrying or farming.

An often reoccurring theme of my painting has been the practice of working on the floor using large pieces of unstretched canvas and the rubbing of paint into the surface with rag’s, often stencilling words or cutting the surface with charcoal.

I have borrowed techniques off traditional South Pacific Tapa cloth format’s, used Polynesian symbolic motif’s and common cargo stencils, to create images which relate to the idea of storytelling and the exploration of a cultural identity.

Currently I have been working on a series of works based around the book Riddley Walker: The whole of life is created with a thin veneer of reality and truth. Scrape it back and all actions, life forms and landscapes have a cruel reality. There is something deeply compelling about revelling the ugliness of human nature underneath the veil of civilisation and the edgy knowledge that when one pulls ones head out of the sand the only real truth is that you are alive, standing right here, right now. With this in mind the current work for the show has been created, paring the notion of a single finite moment and the eternal “post final moment” experience, down to their most simple, most compelling visual forms.

Utilising a white square placed upon a white wall a single moment of a human existence is caught, framed by time (the square), ultimately to be released into the surrounding structureless plain of the white wall as it (the moment), eventually passes.
That point within the human experience, where the recognition of time and the perception of a moment finally finishes: the post final moment experience, is captured by the black rectangle, elongated potentially to infinity, suggesting timelessness and the unknown, the cessation of all interpretational experiences.

The black rectangle is pervasive and intrusive a certainty jarring on the white wall of past moments.

The force of a probable truth, viewed initially as a shape and then read as a monochrome pigment, cannot be avoided.”