CHRISTABEL
MACGREEVY
I always use drawing as a way of generating ideas. I like to work in different mediums because it engages different aspects of my brain. Working in clay has been a steep learning curve, and being self taught means I have made a lot of mistakes along the way. It's a continual process of acquiring more pieces of information which help to comprise a bigger picture of how to best handle it. I love that clay is just mud. It's so primal and instinctive to us as humans to try and make things out of mud. I like to be a part of this lineage of mud play.
“Over the last year or so my sculpture practice has moved into ceramics. Working in clay has been a great exercise in experimentation and perseverance. Every time something emerges from the kiln, you imagine how it could have been that bit different. This makes it addictive for sure.”
I spent three months at the start of this year, and last year in Guadalajara Mexico doing a residency with clay, where I had access to try many different things. With the luxury of this time and the facilities, I was able to take risks and develop a new language in mud.
When I want stimulation I use the British library for a day of researching or I go see exhibitions round London. I loved the Cornelia Parker show at Tate Britain recently, I had to go twice. Her mixture of curiosity and pragmatism and the way she uses storytelling to expand on the work really gripped me.
Christabel MacGreevy is an interdisciplinary artist concerned with archetypes, communication and memory, explored through the interplay of the personal and universal. MacGreevy uses storytelling and an idiosyncratic iconography to express what it is to experience the human condition, with its complexities, joys, miseries, furies and madness.
Working in paint, ceramics, sculpture, and textiles, with a practice that centers in drawing, MacGreevy considers the concept of performance and ritual to be present in her drawing practice. Drawing every day, she uses the primitivity of mark making as the simplest means of self expression and movement flow from the mind into the tangible world via paper.
