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Free Fall, 2008, oil on acrylic on canvas, 2 x 1.6m

With her solo exhibition to open at the Irma Stern Gallery in Cape Town next week (23 September 2008), I took the opportunity to speak to Virginia MacKenny about many things, including her most recent body of work.

 
I pick my way through the puddles to the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where I am due to meet Virginia MacKenny, on a typically dismal winter’s day in Cape Town. I climb the three flights of steps to her studio on the top floor of the building, which seems to be empty. As I begin my descent to find the usually-bubbly and always difficult-to-locate secretary, that seems a fixture of every Fine Art Department, I meet MacKenny on the long climb up. She looks quizzically at her watch, affirming my presence as premature, and ushers me into her studio. She describes it as a state of chaos, but it is really a haven of creativity, which for MacKenny comes mainly in blue. She offers me a chair, opting herself for a folding ladder, and readies herself for a stream of questions. After the first question is asked (the standard “How did you get to where you are?”), however, what was anticipated by us both as an interview transforms into a more informal conversation, in which all of my questions were answered despite very few being asked.

Virginia MacKenny was born in London and moved to South Africa at the age of thirteen. Her family settled in Pietermaritzburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, and, when choosing a school, MacKenny’s only request was that she attended the school with the best art teacher. At the time, that happened to be Girl’s Collegiate, who’s art teacher was Nielson Baker, known affectionately by her students as “Nelly B” and, quietly, as “The Viking”. At first, MacKenny and Baker did not get on, which resulted in MacKenny’s decision to leave the art course altogether. However, a few weeks later, having spent most of her time hanging around the art room and interrogating her peers about their projects, MacKenny returned to the course and got on famously with Baker the second time round. MacKenny remembers that “The Viking” ‘wasn’t like any other teacher – she never went to assembly, she never did what she was supposed to do, she just never towed the line’. As a school girl, “I was in the art room”, was always a good excuse for dedicating more time to art than to one’s official school obligations.

MacKenny went on to study at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. Despite being warned that she had no chance of making a living in the Arts, and encouraged on a number of occasions to enrol for a Higher Diploma in Education, she solidly resisted, opting instead for a degree in Fine Art. She attributes her choice to ‘not being able to think of doing anything else’. However, her first two years at university were difficult as she felt no connection to many of the projects she worked on. It is at this point that “The Viking” became a ‘lifesaver’. During her difficult time, MacKenny spent 7 days with Baker in Paris, where they ‘had a fabulous time…we just looked at art!’ MacKenny describes how her first-hand experience of the art works she had been engaging with in reproduction in class revitalised her desire to paint. It is a concern, MacKenny says, of being trained in South Africa, that one does not have access to original works, in the traditional sense, as this lack of direct engagement can mean that ‘you don’t have anything to look at, to give you an idea of how you’re going to do it.
Although, it must be said, that her experience with Baker for those seven days was far from conventional – she describes a particular visit to the Louvre, where Baker charged around the museum only allowing her to see 12 works, of which none was the Mona Lisa. ‘Only about four trips later,’ MacKenny quips, when she finally did spend some time with the famous masterpiece, ‘did I think perhaps she’d made the right decision.’

After completing her studies at the University of Natal, MacKenny spent some time overseas. She was surprised, she says, upon her return home, at her father’s questions of, ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ She started a search for museum work, which ended abruptly when someone at the Durban University of Technology (previously Technikon Natal) resigned with only 24 hours notice. To fill the gap, MacKenny took up the post. Hence, she describes her involvement with education as accidental, although she soon realised that she loves to teach and has done so for the last 24 years.

When asked which work she would choose as her first, MacKenny selects the painting that won her the Volkskas Atelier award (1991): From the Dark, it is so. Her reason for this selection is that she views the work as her masterpiece, in the old sense of the word, meaning the work that moves an artist beyond their apprenticeship. When asked to describe her progress from then to now MacKenny gains a slight look of regret: she feels that, having so many caps to juggle – artist, teacher, writer, the list goes on – her development is ‘lumpy’ and her production ‘not huge’. As to where she sees herself going from here, she is even more reluctant to say: ‘You can use your intellect to assess where you are from where you’ve been, but it’s difficult to use your intellect to assess where you’re going.’ For MacKenny it is more important to have a ‘sense of things’ than a concrete plan. She chooses rather to allow things to develop as they will, which requires a large amount of trust, but allows ‘real qualities’ to emerge.

MacKenny feels much the same way about her work. She describes painting as a ‘journey of getting to know oneself and the world,’ as she never really knows what each painting will contain. She begins knowing only a few elements of the painting, and allows the rest to surface as she works. MacKenny feels that this ‘vagueness of thought’ is necessary, as it ‘ensures outcomes that are not predetermined. Released from the straitjacket of expectation or intent, an apparently gratuitous connection between similar looking things may prove unexpectedly fruitful’ (MacKenny 2008: “Artworks in Progress 2008”).

For instance, in Free Fall, the image MacKenny began with was the picture of the ship. Originally, there was a comet (or, rather, the birth of a star) which was replaced with various others as MacKenny worked. Each object that appears in MacKenny’s paintings is usually something that she has observed outside; as Philip Guston put it: ‘a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about’ (MacKenny 2008: “Artworks in Progress 2008”). Some things are reproduced as they appear to MacKenny, in realistic, recognisable form, such as the toy aeroplanes spinning around their metal tower. Others, however, are abstracted from their original form. For example, the radiant clusters began as lights on a Christmas tree. MacKeny describes a winter spent in New York for the Ampersand Fellowship, when the trees in the street are laden with Christmas lights. There was one particular tree which had what appeared as nests of light perched in it. The clusters are what remain from that image. ‘I know where they came from; I know what they feel like, but I have no name for them,’ says MacKenny of her objects, which ‘potentially glow, potentially radiate, potentially dim.’

MacKenny utters a self-deprecating laugh, admitting that speaking of her work is always tricky as she feels that the impression created is that her concerns are with clichés – roses, the starry night sky, Christmas trees. Of course, this is far from the truth. MacKenny’s acknowledges the attraction of clichés – the feeling people have for them doesn’t want to go away. They are denuded, but perennial. Her use of images to which many people have connections lends her work a sense of nostalgia, but in her most recent work MacKenny has discovered a term that is perhaps more appropriate.

The term ‘solastalgia’ was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the effects of global warming on the mental states of Australians. The combination of solacium (comfort) and algia (pain) infers an emotional disquiet that results from nostalgia firmly rooted in the now. The pain of nostalgia comes from taking comfort in the things that have given one pleasure in the past, but realising that those things are no longer. Solastalgia, however, indicates a present that is becoming a past before one’s very eyes; the environment, which we imbue with so much meaning, is disappearing as we watch it.

MacKenny is quick to state, ‘I don’t do issues; I have no political agenda.’ However, in this most recent body of work, she certainly has ecological concerns, though they are not manifested as activism. MacKenny’s concerns are ‘about caring, not necessarily posturing.’ Developing this, MacKenny recalls a point raised by Jenni Trethowan of Baboon Matters in her introduction of Jane Goodall, who recently visited Simonstown: that the human species is care-less – without care, for ourselves, for our environment, for the things that surround us. It is out of an increasing need to become care-full that MacKenny’s concerns are borne. The delicate network of connections that is formed between the objects floating in her enormous canvasses contain meaning, in themselves, because they are every-day objects to which most people can relate. The paintings cause emotional (solastalgic) disquiet as a result of their sense of alienation and isolation: their dream-like quality speaks of a fragile reality that is fast becoming a fantasy. In connecting up the dots between each familiar (and sometimes dramatic) image, one becomes isolated: either one is isolated as in dreaming we are disconnected from reality; or, one is isolated from reality because what we imagine as reality has slipped away and all one is left with is our dream of how things were. MacKenny chooses to use everyday objects to express these concerns because, too often, the big stories and the grand gestures appear to us outside our personal worlds. What MacKenny aims to do, is to bring the big concerns back to quotidian reality.

As to the combination of comfort and pain in her work, MacKenny believes that pain and alienation allows sensitisation – ‘if you are a feeling human being, your vulnerability in that situation can open you up to other things.’ In this sense, MacKenny lends reverence to things for which one wouldn’t necessarily have reverence. A glass of water becomes a sacred thing – a mundane instance without which we could not, after all, survive. Her paintings become a ‘conflation of opposites’, in which ‘it all exists in the tiniest thing,’ that gently suggest the necessity to become sensitised to where we are.

MacKenny, on her way to get on with the hectic business of putting up her show, sees me out of the building and into a burst of sunshine. As I express my delight at the rare winter glow, MacKenny laughs in agreement. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but I like the weather here – it keeps you on your toes.’

Keywords: Art, David-Krut, Painting, South-African, Virginia MacKenny