Statement
I treat all media as time-based, working in sculpture, textile, video, and text to stage installations. My materials are both ephemeral and geologic, including kitchen waste, ice, algae, gelatin, silk, stones, construction discards, ‘obsolete’ media, and audiovisual elements.
My material practice pursues a deep curiosity about how human bodies and activities become part of an emerging physical landscape – chimeric animal and mineral formations which extend far beyond our finite life spans into the past and the future. How do our relationships to land, water, and time shift when we consider the presence of heavy metals, plastics, chemical residues, and ancient minerals among my own blood, bones, and soft tissues? How do we imagine the future fossils of our daily lives?
I am drawn to ageing, analog, and material media formats as a persistent grasping for a means of connection – finding a poetics within the flawed and handmade codes, tools, and signals by which humans past and present participate in making meaning of, and in, the world. The imperfect replication of an object or image, realized as an ice projection, melting sugar bottle, or eggshell-concrete hammer, becomes a testing ground for the slippage of meaning. The failure of materials, memory, and utility is an inevitable outcome of living in time.
What shifts when we direct our gaze away from the horizon to the foreground, where we currently stand? In the hybrid zone between a rocky present and unknown futures, I work to invoke cycles of entropy, transformation, and renewal.
Bio
Cecilia McKinnon is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from California and New Mexico, currently living and working on occupied Lenni-Lenape land in Philadelphia, PA. McKinnon’s work explores entropy, time, precarious landscapes, and ‘natural’ histories through sculpture, video, textiles, and creative writing.
McKinnon has shared work at Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), Vox Populi and Cherry Street Pier (Philadelphia), Amos Eno Gallery (NYC), and RIPA Festival and FoFA Gallery (Montreal). She received the Emerging Artist Award in Surface Design’s 2021 Exhibition in Print and she published two works of creative nonfiction in Sección Amarilla de la Migración, a 2022 anthology distributed to migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. She is a member of GRAFT Collective, based between Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Louisville, and of the Biomaterials Working Group, a Philadelphia-based collective for research and experimentation with sustainable materials.
McKinnon has taught at Concordia University, University of Delaware, and Moore College of Art and Design; she has also facilitated public workshops through Teaching at the End of Times (Vox Populi), Club Plastique (Verticale), and the University City Arts League. She holds a Master of Fine Art in Fibers + Material Practices from Concordia University in Montréal, and a BFA from the University of New Mexico.
Contact
mckinnoncecilia [at] gmail.com | @dork.fortress