Christabel MacGreevy (b. 1991) is a British artist living and working in London. Her interdisciplinary practice is concerned with myth, love, and memory explored through folklore, art history and personal mythology, explored through the interplay of the personal and the universal. MacGreevy uses storytelling and an idiosyncratic iconography to express what we may struggle to say in words; identity, masculinity, femininity, and what it is to experience the human condition, with its complexities, joys, miseries, furies and madness. MacGreevy's works explore ideas of memory, identity and the human inclination to transform the significance of the inanimate, or overlooked object into a personal shrine. Her bold drawing practice has an emphasis on pattern, colour and graphic lines lending itself to an expanded practice which includes collage, printmaking, textiles and more recently, ceramic sculpture.
Read MoreMacGreevy uses a range of techniques and materials to denote both the physical and psychological properties of her sculptural series; terracotta for her figurative vessels, durable and resilient to cracking like her characters themselves; light stoneware and bead glazes fired at high temperatures for wall-mounted medallions based on medieval depictions of plants and strange objects that carry a resonance of magical properties and healing power. The latter works evoke the dichotomy of the woman as witch, the artist as healer, the intertwining of the two. MacGreevy explores a woman's role in society through her relationship to magic and the historical necessity of connecting to supernatural powers, as a means of control. Her graphic appliquéd figures which weave themselves around her curiously shaped vessels hold small clues indicative of a wider narrative, glimpses into the privacy of a life, their own lives, but also every life. "In the same way that Orlando defies gender and time and Hogarth's Rake moves through his chaotic existence," MacGreevy comments, "the figures on my vessels live out their lives, an expression of freedom, fluidity, and nonconformity."
MacGreevy studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London (2010) and the Ecole de Beaux Arts, Paris (2013), before completing her Postgraduate diploma from The Royal Drawing School, London (2016). Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, both in group shows and solo exhibitions.
Text courtesy Tristan Hoare Gallery.
