Christine Mackey
(Christine Mackey)
Biography
Christine Mackey is a visual artist who develops relational, site-responsive works that engage with biodiversity loss across land and water ecologies. Her practice proposes models of renewal, collective care, and positive environmental change, foregrounding dialogue, participation, and ecological awareness.
In 2025, Mackey presented a major solo exhibition at The Model, Sligo, supported by an Arts Council Projects Award. Current and recent residencies include The Garden Studio at Butler Gallery, Farm Walks, The Dock, and WATERlands Horizon (UCD, 2026). International residencies span CRUX, Newfoundland (Canada); Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Jeollanam-do Cultural Foundation, South Korea; and Woodland Symposium / Interface, Galway.
Selected group exhibitions include Still, We Gather, Galway Arts Centre; Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, London; 1000 Ecologies Utopiana, Geneva; and Profondeurs, Irish Cultural Centre, Paris (2025). Mackey has presented at Art, Activism & Eco-Art Communities at the Sorbonne, Paris, and in 2026 will present work at Supermarket Stockholm, supported by Culture Ireland.
She is an alumni Fulbright Research Scholar (2018) and holds a practice-based PhD from the University of Ulster (2012). Her work has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Awards, Leitrim Arts Office Bursary Awards, and Culture Ireland Exhibition Travel Awards.
Drawing Statement
Drawing is central to my practice as an investigative process that moves across site-specific, gallery-based, and published contexts. Rather than a fixed medium, I treat drawing as something considered, variable, and responsive and as a means of depicting actions, processes, and events. In recent years, I have extended this practice through the process of diagramming. This diagramming context is understood as an open system, to move between registers, the intuitive, the analytical, the personal and the collective. This expanded notion of drawing is informed by systems theory and cybernetics, specifically the principle of feedback, the process by which any system evolves and learns as a self-organising entity, coupled to, rather than separated from, other systems. In relocating drawing within the field of the diagram, not to fix it there, but to open new possibilities for a responsive, discursive practice. This is drawing as social praxis - a way of thinking with, through and alongside the world.
Artist's Collection
