Ally McKay

Catalogue Essay written by Liam Bryan-Brown - Click for link

Written review by Miranda Hine for Garland Magazine Issue G28 – Know-How: The grammar of making, Cutting category.
Click the here to read the full article.

Outerspace Artist Run Initiative Fundraiser - Exhibition Catalogue

Cats Do Not Go To Heaven - Exhibition Catalogue - Click for Link

In her essay, “Shakespeare’s Sister”, published in the eminent feminist text, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), Virginia Woolf critiques the words of historian G. M. Trevelyan, who asserted that cats do not go to heaven, and women cannot write the words of Shakespeare. In 2013, Knighted German artist Georg Baselitz infamously stated in an interview, “Women do not paint very well. It’s a fact.”

While many of the barriers to having a creative practice that existed in Woolf’s time have been dismantled through rigorous efforts of 20th-century activists, it would be naïve to suggest we are (regardless of gender) free from the fetters of patriarchy. Almost a century on, Woolf’s text remains an unsettling and uncanny mirror to contemporary conversations surrounding certain gendered experiences.

‘Cats Do Not Go to Heaven’ brings together five artists who make work while experiencing the world as women. The exhibition is curated by Caity Reynolds and features work by Savannah Jarvis, Dana Lawrie, Mary Letain, Ally McKay and Kate McKay, who each make art very well. It’s a fact.

Accompanied by texts by Kat Campbell and Chloe Waters.

Caity Reynolds

Exhibition Preface - Click for Link

Ally McKay. Two Weeks in London.

This piece echoes the disillusionment I felt when travelling to visit a friend in London. Expecting to find a sense of fulfillment, I was confronted with the hustle and bustle of a big city that had such little regard for the individual. Overwhelmed by transport lines, maps and weaving streets, I took comfort in coming home to make this piece to establish a meditative routine amongst the chaos. I had an overwhelming sense of emptiness which led me to consider working with the emptiness of the lined page. By cutting and removing the red lines, I attempted to find my own way of strengthening the emptiness through repetition. I began weaving the lines to form a stronger grid-like pattern, rearranging the structure to feel strong again. This piece is about finding strength in emptiness and rewriting structure in times where hope is evasive.

Exhibition Catalogue Essay

United by their sensitive approaches to materiality, Harriet Body, Ally McKay and Monique Tregenza’s new exhibition “Subtle” brings together delicate and precise work. These process driven pieces embrace a pared back logic that finds elegant simplicity in poetic unions of substance and space.

Through a range of installation, assemblage and paper based works, “Subtle” explores the motivation shared by each of these artists to use the vocabulary of materials to communicate the innate complexity present in gestures of subtlety.

Lisa Bryan-Brown.

Residue Exhibition Documentation - Clarence School House Art Gallery - Click for Link

Exhibition Review - Priscilla Beck - Click for Link

‘Residue’ explores that which remains behind after a core is lost. Brisbane based artists Ally McKay and Tess Mehonoshen depict a delicate but prevailing determination to rebuild and plough forward through loss, using material and spatial relationships to convey intimate experiences.

Both artists share an affinity to material processes, working with found and sourced materials to create minimal sculpture and installation based work. They draw out the raw potential in their materials, relying on inherent qualities; playing upon and exaggerating strengths and weaknesses to layer meaning within their work. Paying particular attention to the site-specificity of the Schoolhouse Gallery, the artists’ works seek to strike a balance between both hiding within the space, and intruding upon it.

Taut Documentation - Click for Link

Taut Exhibition Review - Miranda Hine - Click for Link

Systems of support make for precarious object interactions in Ally McKay's exhibition Taut.
Objects are assembled in tentative arrangements, expected - somehow- to support each other against inescapable physical forces. Taut invites us into a beautiful balancing act between tension, failure and endurance. It's an act we have all at some point been familiar with.

In systems where rules have already been set, either social rules or rules of gravity, we have little choice but to navigate them regardless of how little sense they make or support they afford us. Using simple materials linked to building and construction, Ally reflects on her own vulnerabilities and the resilience required to constantly stay upright against the pressure to collapse and fall within these systems. Ally's constructions are a determination to make things work. Her quiet installations embrace fragility and speak of growth and adaptation to new environments.

Miranda Hine

Click for link to In Residence Information

Click for Link to Centrefold Close Up

Brisbane based artist Ally McKay situates her practice somewhere between text and material poem. Since graduating QCA with Honours in 2015, Ally has been fiddling with gathered materials in the form of small scale installation and paper based sculpture, to express experiences that resist verbal and written representation. Ally is concerned with translating moments of vulnerability to consider the nature of relationships, exposing the inevitable grief that must accompany love. Most recently, her work is investigating the unsteady nature of solitude and the rise and fall of resilience.

Interview Questions

 1.      Text and poetry are a major part of your work, whereas a lot of artists seem to use their work instead of words. What’s the attraction to text for you?

 Reflective writing has been something I have done since I was very little, I’ve always kept journals and written poetry on scraps of paper growing up.
My attraction to text is multifaceted but mostly it is the act of writing, scratchy pen on paper goodness which I find cements something for me. I often feel scrambled in my thoughts until I pen them and everything seems to decode.  

When I use text within my practice, it is often to confront subjects I struggle to verbalise. So there must be something about the directness of the medium that I am attracted to and the authority attached to that as well.  Most recently, I have struggled to use text to translate the complexity of grief, as I found words brutally direct with regards to this kind of subject matter. As a result, I have landed into this zone of material poetics, using materials to somehow compensate for the words I cannot find, countering this directness through a sheer presence of materials.

I think within my practice as a whole, there is this ongoing relationship between text and my visual/material practice and I am constantly negotiating my work within these boundaries. I find when I am not writing, I am making. Similarly, when I can’t find the right materials or inspiration in the studio, I find myself writing.  Perhaps this is also my attraction to concrete poetry as a way to combine the two.

2.      I’ve always perceived the post-war emergence of concrete poetry as quite masculine and assertive. What would a concrete poetry revival movement led by Ally McKay look like?

 I would agree with you to an extent here, although I have never really thought of it in these terms.  I came across the work of Nicholas Zurbrugg most recently and have been really inspired by his wacky connections to concrete poetry, text and performance. He instigated a concrete poetry magazine called “Stereo Headphones” which involved a number of artists working with text and the space of the page.  I think you can still achieve a subtlety within concrete poetry and I am interested in the tension between that direct assertiveness that you mention in contrast to more ambiguous text using the visual to layer meaning.

I am inspired by what Zurbrugg started, being a Brisbane based artist also, connecting artists internationally, conducting interviews and creating platforms for artists to engage with each other.

I would like to do something similar to encourage a revival of the page as a creative space, and distribute works in a less formal context than the exhibition space.  So when I do start to organise something of this manner, I would invite artists to contribute a page of concrete poetry or work which responds to the boundaries of the page and create a document that could be distributed in both a printed and electronic format.  For me personally, I love the challenge of working within the field of the page and the history behind text as a medium inspires me to be more creative with something we rely on and use on a daily basis.

  3.      I loved your desire to keep a sense of community within practicing artists outside the institution, through a curated program of open studios. Please tell me you have a plan to start this!

 I am interested in getting involved with public programming and connecting artists outside of the small talk of opening nights and I am always thinking about how to sustain my livelihood and stimulate creative practice away from the institution.

The main thing I miss about uni is that sense of community and feeling like you were all in something together. I think there needs to be more sharing about how people manage their practice while working crappy jobs and more support in the everyday parts of the art world, not the dress ups of it all. 

So I have been thinking about how to do this and break down these barriers.

One thing I am really concerned about as an artist is not getting honest feedback on my work and I thought maybe a curated program of open studios would present an opportunity to expose work to new audiences so that your work is being seen by fresh eyes. I know myself as an artist, I really struggle to edit out my good and bad work and sometimes I hide things away in the studio as well. 

I think this would be a good entry point to answer questions and create some beneficial feedback that can be constructive.

 I have been starting up some art making nights with a group of friends where we take it in turns to have dinner and present a small piece of our work, like a mini critique. I have vision to keep growing this humble beginning to create a making space where people can bring their projects with a set talk at the end offering feedback, open to work in progress chats and studio visit cycles.  I am about to go away for a while so hopefully when I get back I can invest more time into these thoughts.

 4.      You work a lot with system cards. Is there something to do with order and control that draws you to mediums like that?

 Yes, definitely something about order and control, reconstructing and deconstructing systems, and I think something of rebuilding also.  There is an emptiness to them and structure within the lined construct that I keep coming back to.

5.      References to rainbows appear in your work quite a frequently. I’ve never thought of rainbows as representing much more than happiness and pride, but you pick up a fragility that lurks under their bright facade. What do they mean for you?

 Rainbows keep standing in for a lot of my emotions at the moment. I am feeling them as almost a strange sad visual metaphor for chasing this unobtainable happiness we are all after. The illusionary nature of them, being fleeting and momentary strikes a chord with me. The shape also keeps reoccurring in my life, this wave of starting low, hitting a peak and then coming back down seems to me a lot more of a reality than this colourful strong symbol of happiness and pride.  I didn’t think of them as fragile but I suppose you are right, there is this fragility to their experience also, always after rain, after bad, there is this symbol of good. I feel a sense of uselessness with rainbows, we chase them and it is something we can never quite obtain.

6.      Since you’ve left university, what motivates you to get in the studio and keep working? Is it a daily struggle or a joy?

When I finished uni I remember really worrying if I would continue practicing, and a friend simply said to me, of course you always will, it’s what you’ve always done. And I do, I’ve had a break from honours, done a small clay course, and small workshops along the way. But I surround myself with creative people and keep making myself commit more time to art. I am always most motivated when I am in a state of anxiety, which is not the most healthy way to stimulate my practice, but I create work from life experience and everything is very much emotion based. Sometimes it’s a daily struggle, sometimes a joy, I think like the rainbow, very up and down. 

 7.      Is Brisbane where you see yourself in ten years?

 Yes, I think so. I intend to travel and do some other things in the meantime… Here’s hoping. But Brisbane is home and I do feel attached to it in some way and it definitely has a lot of creative potential which I really want to contribute to.

We have been presented with a roadmap into contemporary abstraction and minimalism. through the platform of collage, the assemblage of imagery, form and colour the impalpable is evoked. These elements collide on these artworks surfaces, it is the surface of each of these works that license the viewer to perceive what they feel themselves and to be affected by the work through the constructs of their own perception.  Brian Massumi iterates that affects are moments of intensity, a reaction of the body within or without. This disjunction brings the evocation of this exhibition into focus, where the boundaries of limits are blurred and the role of experience is magnified. ‘Intensity and experience accompany one another, like two mutually presupposing dimensions. (Massumi, 1995, 94)

 It seems fitting that the artists involved in pieces all use methods of collage as this exhibition transforms what, in itself, could be a 2-dimensional collage into the 3-dimensional; where instead of just shifting around we can move among, over and beneath. This is a collage of artists, a kaleidoscope of thoughts and realities.  Cosima Scales, Karl Shoobridge, Mitchell Donaldson, and Ally Mckay present works where tension between the spaces of each piece become palpable through their common uses of materiality, form and imagery; it is this tension that conjures the dialogue that Brian Massumi alludes to. 

Cosima Scales paintings are part of a larger body of work exploring themes of landscape and yearning through interactions of colour, tone and scale in the grouping of works.  The subject matter comes from photographs that have been taken usually while travelling.  The representations she paints don’t reveal a deep knowledge of a place, instead suggest a longing for past experiences and landscapes that have been known only superficially, both first hand and then as photographs.  Making representational images that at first glance leaves us a little unsure as to what we are looking at, Cosima paints these in part to reorientate their own relationship with the places depicted, building new and more considered experiences of them through paint.

Created in Mexico and exhibited out of context in Havana, Cuba, Karl Shoobridge is pleased to return these works to an institutional framework within Australia.  The works form part of a larger interrogation into a process based methodology.  Utilising non-objective forms without reference points, the collages establish their presence using rudimentary signifiers.  That of the binary, the pattern, material evidence and subjective memory.  Decontextualised in their fabrication and exhibition, the artists own working methodology aligns with the viewers learnt process of intrinsic problems and overall resolutions. These works exhibited function as peripheral experiments in the nature of self-taught and our collective mapping of knowledge.

Extending from concepts of the collective, Mitchell Donaldson’s work explores the distinction between the human and non-human, questioning the idealisation of nature as passive and outside of humanity and, in turn, question the human agency implied in the creative process; through a primarily collage based practice within which materials are continually recycled and re-arranged.  Eschewing reference to external image, ideas or objects on the ground amongst leaf litter, suggesting an expansive field of hidden entities at once discarded and discovered. 

 Ally  McKay situates her practice as part of the text and image dichotomy, using the concept of material poetics to convey subtleties of the lived experience.  McKay’s art practice is coming to terms with re-ordering structuring and stabilising.  Shifting a feeling of overwhelming hopelessness to small side on confrontations, while using found materials and everyday items chosen for their material strengths and weaknesses.  This practice is striving to make things that show a quiet resilience, to stand strong despite all odds.

 As these artists works are stitched together within the walls of metro arts we can begin to better understand the complexities and intensities of each practice and beyond that, ourselves as audience members.  The viewer and the art will intertwine as time is given to each piece and as these artists wrestle with those concepts of intensity and experience. 

Matthew Sneesby.

Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award 2017 - Click for Link and Catalogue
Pg 86

Material poetics is at the core of my practice for conveying the subtleties of the lived experience. With a minimalistic approach, I use familiar and accessible materials to draw attention to individual material qualities, layering these qualities to express feeling. Subverting their usual function, I have turned staples on their side to act as a metal staircase. Within my work there is an insoluable tension, evident in the relationships between material parts. No longer holding and trapping, these staples now facilitate the path of a cotton thread rainbow, rising and sinking on the back drop of a common place system card.

I aim to create works which express a form of gentle resilience, walking the line between holding and falling. With this piece, I am translating a feeling of uselessness. Bringing to the fore the constant battle of trying and failing, rising and falling as we all must do. The shadow of the string forms an elusive black rainbow which reflects my futile attempt for happiness after a period of great loss.

Ally McKay

Mote Exhibition Review - Click For Link

Mote Exhibition Review - Annelize Mulder - In Residence Publication - Click For Link

relationship:

Alison McKay’s work is fragile. Her practice is vulnerable and reflects the nature of her concerns. How do we describe an event when the language we use effectively alters its representation. In these works we are confronted with paradoxes supported by teetering structures. The material forms are tenuous and yet the immaterial here is substantial.

A suspended rectangular sandscape, orderly pierced by nails and eroded at the edges. We sense this object might fall any moment in a number of ways. As in all of McKay’s work there is an insoluble tension in this piece, evident in the relationships between its material parts. Take the escarpment edges, the unstable nature of sand and the piercing nails. Experience would tell us a nail probably formed these edges and yet the ordered rows of nails imply a more resilient substance than we sense.

These works ask us to be quiet, to consider the nature of relationships, of the inevitable loss that must accompany gain, the grief that must accompany love.

Tim Mosely

Everything is Connected Catalogue - Click for Link

Ally McKay. Small stands teeter on the high-heeled awkwardness of their handmade-ness. Like young women affecting glamour, this wilful ungainliness is appealing and endearing. Each of them carries its own publication – little books that seem equally unsure of their own purpose and destination. Hand-made and tender, they sometimes offer clues about private hopes and gentleness; at other times they rebuff attempts at translation with the abrasive refusal of sandpaper words and barcodes. In these works McKay continues her exploration of the interconnectedness of art and text and the materials from which they are constructed. She dares to take the most ephemeral and fragile of personal whims and moments and reconstructs them into objects that often seem too private for public consumption. As a result the viewer becomes implied in a role that must be equally as careful; equally as caring in order to meet the artist in a tryst of sharing emotions, hints, fleeting whims and perhaps gentle, contingent truths.

Pat Hoffie

11:11 Catalogue - Click for Link

Alison McKay.

Alison McKay’s text based works possess a delicacy and intimacy that nostalgically connects to the written letter. The artist’s hand is prominently present as McKay cuts away the medium reveling the emotional center of the work contained in the negative space of the text. There is a play between the public and private. The statements are intimate and personal. As the viewer reads them through windows in the envelopes, and interacts in a tactile manner, lifting the sheets, there is a sense of invasion. Touching private moments, reading letters that were not intended for you. The pinnacle moment of the artist hand present in the work arises in McKay’s work Bite Me. The soft, intimate and ‘cheeky’ text is accompanied by the artist’s teeth marks embossed in paper. Confronting the audience by presenting herself, her body, her presence to the audience.

Naomi O’Reilly

2014 Graduate Exhibition Catalogue - Click for Link

Page 42

My Practice exposes intimate thoughts concealed within the mind, revealing relationship moments and awkward encounters through the staging and layering of familiar materials. The artist book format invites a private engagement with these unspoken thoughts, allowing snippets of text and concrete poetry to echo between transparent pages. Working with connotations of ready-made materials, surfaces and light, I aim to also generate installation and sculptural investigations into the tension between public and private.

Undress, 2014