2009 MFA Artist: Anna Laurie Mackay
Anna Laurie Mackay's Artist Statement
I create containers for intimate spaces. In reflecting on my body and myself, I have come to an awareness that my body most comfortably exists in small, private places. In his book, Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard said it well, “Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.” Even before the house, my body was enclosed within the womb, and after death it will be placed in a coffin; there is an internal need to have my body contained, covered or enclosed. Whether in an interior or exterior space I dwell, I inhabit, I occupy. I have a relationship with space.
My work is a series of mental maps that represent memories I have of specific places I have occupied. Making is about remembering. Remembering movements, remembering gestures, remembering events, remembering places. It is quite a selfish process-the works are made for my own remembering, to evoke my own personal memory. My hands have a memory. It is through making these works that I come to understand how I exist, how I dwell, and how I inhabit space.
