Any readers currently struggling with a creative blockage should take heart from how London-based Highlander Mackie came up with this intriguing portfolio of unlikely properties – a journey that started with a box of Sylvanian Families, of all things.
A present for his son from a friend, the furry little toys wouldn’t stop winking at Mackie from the corner of his studio, until an idea presented itself to try some chiaroscuro sketches with the cute creatures recast as horror film-set characters. It didn’t work, and first the bunnies went, followed by the horror sets, which would leave – if conventional mathematics applied – nothing. But this being an equation of art and ideas, the arithmetic of natural numbers doesn’t apply. What was left, in fact, was the foundations of Abandoned Dollhouses, in which a series of diverse yet uniformly derelict buildings and homesteads reveal themselves to contain surprisingly incongruous interiors – a hulking great Jeff Koons sculpture inside a dilapidated wooden mill, for example.
The collection is being exhibited at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, London, as part of Frieze antidote The Other Art Fair between 17 and 20 October.
