RECEPTION: SEP 19

Ella Mackinson

EXHIBIT OVERVIEW

As a woman raised in the South, Ella Mackinson’s art explores going away from and coming back home. Through oil paintings and small quilt works she opens a visual dialogue that examines the tension between craft and fine art and her personal and familial history.

EXHIBIT STATEMENTS

This exhibition will be a continuation of my senior thesis show that was on view this past April at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. My show Every Stitch a Reckoning explores transient memory, homesickness, and family tradition through an awareness that only comes from physical and temporal distance from childhood environments. Now that I have made my way back to North Carolina from Brooklyn, my work focuses more on the aftermath of homesickness and my bittersweet homecoming. In addition to the work produced in my thesis show I have included a series of small works that continue my artistic process that I had in New York in a communal studio space that I now have to continue in a home studio in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Most of these new works are small quilts reminiscent of my thesis work along with oil paintings that depict mundane everyday scenes with a sense of melancholy and discomfort, reminiscent of 20th century landscape painters Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. These moods mimic my experiences and anxieties as a woman who grew up in the American South. I made myself small and unassuming, hiding from others’ judgments. While my identity as an affluent white woman allows for the idealization of childhood, I use color to draw the line between reckoning and romanticization of Southern domestic life. I use quilting as a call to women’s craft and labor movements throughout history, which included women in several generations of my own family. Juxtaposed with oil painting, quilting becomes fine art, rather than “only” women’s craft work. The quilts also bring comfort back into my work, allowing for innocence and nostalgia to coexist with otherworldly and unsettling vignettes. This illuminates the tension between the paradigm of North Carolina’s values and the underlying complexity of its violent yet rich history.

ARTIST BIO Ella Raewyn Mackinson is a 22-year-old artist born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina and a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with a BFA in painting. Working primarily with oil paint and quilting, her artwork is centered around life in the South showcasing the region’s cultural diversity and unique natural beauty. Since beginning studies in New York City, her work has showcased the contrast between the bustling city and the rural South. Her artwork was selected to be on billboards for a year as a part of the ArtPop Street Gallery Class of 2021 in Charlotte, NC and her work was exhibited on a billboard at the Ann and Jim Goodnight Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art in March of 2022. Her work was also selected for juried exhibitions at the Arts Council of York County in Rock Hill, SC and the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center in Brooklyn, NY.