Postcards from Envelopes

Taking the legacies of both minimalism and conceptualism as her departure points MacKillop invests a quiet precision in her often disarmingly modest and deceptively informal gestures. Using found materials that typically have some relationship to the hand (e.g. pens, suspension files, balls of string etc.) MacKillop applies her own particular logic to re-purposing these objects as art. Staged together in a kind of mise-en-scene or quasi-theatrical tableau, there is a dead-pan - or even tragic-comic - humour at play in these gestures. Attracted to increasingly anachronistic objects, MacKillop's work evinces a form of melancholia, if not exactly nostalgia, for an entire category of once useful products. Mackillop's process might perhaps be thought of as a kind of informal formalism, her goal a gentle subversion of norms, the result of which is to create works that - despite their barely-thereness - maintain an uncanny presence.

Matthew Higgs