'My Depression' was a joke

Christine Mackie with her winning installation

11 April 2012

Few artists can have been as pilloried for winning as Christina Mackie. Not since Tracey Emin's bed has an artwork elicited such a comprehensive panning as the Beck's Futures entry that earned Mackie the £26,666 top prize at the ICA this week.

Her installation - a wooden shelter, and two slide shows of flowers - includes a papier-mÃ¢ché ball topped by floppy black petals and a shiny sphere which she called My Depression. And she might well be feeling a little blue after reading her critics. They have called her work "the most meaningless assemblage seen in years"; "dull installations of sheds and beanbags".

Mackie seems as equipped to deal with the savagery of the media as a hedgehog is the M1. She speaks in a soft Canadian accent, her eyes rounding with fear. When I meet her at the ICA, where her installation remains on show, she is thronged by press officers, photographers and journalists, and is clearly overwhelmed.

We stand staring at what looks like a giant, and rather burnt, fairy cake. How does she explain this extraordinary work of art?

"The black flower is the depression bit," she explains tentatively, "then there is the puffy part of it below, and then the clear-headed bit at the top represented by a glass globe."

Flowers feature elsewhere. To a loud and constant clicking, two projectors show pretty, colourful images of blurry daisies on the walls. Much of Mackie's work is inspired, she says, by the meadows and log cabins of the Rockies she got to know when growing up in Canada, where her parents took her to live when she was five months old.

One of the projectors is mounted on what looks like a bus shelter - called A Tree's Lament, she explains, a tribute to the fact that the cedar trees used to make it will soon be extinct.

But why, with each click of the carousel, does the slide show darken? "It represents the image of energy emanating from a person's head being removed to blacknesss," she says.

She is beginning to sound quite bleak. But even though she named part of her installation My Depression, she rejects the idea that she is suffering. "No, I'm not depressed. I called it that as a joke," she says, jauntily. She is dressed head-to-toe in black, she adds, because, "I was told it was better when you are having your photograph taken to wear just one tone. But I have plenty of blue jeans at home."

The truth, though, is that Mackie sees depression as a highly productive state, not entirely unwelcome. "You have to go to the blackness as a kind of stilling when you make a body of work. You have to close your mind down to a blackness and from there come new ideas. Some people might read that as depression - but I don't."

Some people might read her wrong in many ways. Those critics, perhaps? Why were they so hostile, does she think? "I assume these people who have criticised my work don't like looking at things. Not everything has to have meaning. You can still look at it and not be so critical," she says evenly.

"Anybody'sinterpretation is valid and totally appreciated by me. People may say that it's meaningless - well perhaps I'm a diffuse thinker. I like to look at things from the side. I like to have various directions in which my thoughts travel."

Born in Oxford 48 years ago to two biology students, Mackie, the eldest
daughter of a family of seven, still looks as if she should be pedalling a bicycle up the Woodstock Road rather than gracing the cool minimalist chambers of the ICA.

Her gentle and thoughtful face is framed by an Edwardian hairstyle kept together by pins and clips, her clothes flap about her like subfusc and yet, incongrously, on her feet she is wearing black ankle socks and the kind of boots favoured by Dennis the Menace.

She returned to England on her 18th birthday and met "a wonderful woman, the artist Mary Adshead, a very kind lady who gave me somewhere to live in north London and acted as a mentor. I went from art school in Vancouver to St Martin's School of Art."

After three years studying fine art she went travelling for a year and then settled down in Dalston, where she has been, more or less, ever since, "surviving", she says, by selling her work, doing a little teaching and "a mish-mash of things". She lives with her boyfriend, Chris, a film compositor.

Tomorrow, her new exhibition opens at the Herald St gallery in east London and in response to her critics' complaints that they can't understand her work, she has named it I Can't Help You. Here is a woman with a sense of humour.

"I've been so busy getting together this show that I haven't had time to read many things in the papers," she says, not entirely convincingly. "My television is broken as well, which is good. I suppose it will blow over, eventually."

It might surprise some to learn that her winning entry cost Mackie about £3,000 to make. "People probably think, 'That's just a load of rickety old stuff there,'" she admits. "I really have no idea why I won the prize. I told my mother not to bother to come to the reception and I had arranged to meet her at a restaurant afterwards as I really had not expected to win."

Some sort of solace for the bashing she has had in the press has come from the kindness of friends. "They were unbelievable. Everybody has been so kind and warm. It was amazing to get handed the prize and to look at this sea of faces and everyone smiling at you."

Because she has been working so hard, Mackie hasn't had time to think much about how she will spend her winnings. "I shall buy tickets to Vancouver to see my parents and then materials for my work, I expect."

Next week she is going to be on the cover of the cutting-edge art magazine, Frieze. This weekend she will be in The Sunday Times. "People know who I am," she says, without a scintilla of relish, "but I would really just like to be able to get on with my work."

'My Depression' was a joke

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