Fiona Mackay

Born 1984, Aberdeen, Scotland. Lives in Glasgow and Brussels.

Mackay’s vibrant wax and batik dye paintings are inherently contrary, oscillating between controlled design and the fluid spontaneity her medium commands. “My work has always been concerned with opposites, whether in regard to medium, imagery, or application, in an attempt to confess a personal narrative, versus a public system of signs always in potential flux,” she says. With her batiks Mackay creates further tension by placing a traditional craft within the context of fine art. “The result is a combination of opposites between male and female,” Mackay explains of the process, “on the one hand connecting to the glory days of abstract painting, a predominantly male territory, while on the other hand situated within the world of textiles and folk art, connected to craft and its usual association to the feminine.”

Isabel Lewis

Born 1981, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Lives in Berlin.

Trained as a dancer, Lewis says that her work “strives to find a new mode of performative expression that is not clearly derivative of performance art, nor of theater, nor of dance, while perhaps touching aspects of all these modes of performance.” In her various activities, which run the gamut from dance to curating to visual art, she frequently collaborates with artists, writers, other dancers, and even family members (she makes work with her three siblings under the name Lewis Forever). Her projects experiment with combinations of dance, film screenings, readings, and other such activities. She sees dance “as a way of conversing with social, aesthetic, and political value systems,” exploring our relationship with objects, spaces, technology, and each other.

This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters and will appear on ARTINFO in two parts.