• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • What’s On
    • Reviews
    • Culture Night 2024
  • Visual Arts
    • Exhibitions
      • Current
      • Touring
      • Forthcoming
      • Past
      • D’Lush Cafe
        • Current Exhibitions
        • Past Exhibitions
    • Residencies
      • Creatives Places
    • Artist Talks
      • Artist Talks
      • Screenings
    • Workshops
      • for Children
    • Living Arts Project
    • Emergence Award
    • MAKE/curate
  • Get Involved
    • Presentation Centre Enniscorthy
    • Creatives Places
    • One Voice Festival:  Voices from near and far
    • Westgate Music Rehearsal Space
    • Job Opportunities
    • Creative Youth Lab 2025
    • Red Moon Creative Arts Theatre
    • Cultural Companions
    • Artist Talks & Screenings
    • Four Rivers Theatre Company
    • WAC Event & Workshop Recordings
  • Your Visit
    • Dlush Cafe
    • Opening hours, Access and Local transport
    • Local Accommodation
    • Covid Protocol
  • Giftshop
  • Support Us
    • Become a Member
    • Supporting Us – Corporate Partnership
    • Dedicate a Seat
    • Wexford Arts Centre Capital Developments
    • Music Artist support fund
    • Make a Donation
  • About
    • Meet the Team
    • What we do
    • Board and Governance
    • Technical Specs
    • Room Hire
    • Box Office Services
    • Child Safeguarding Statement & Privacy and Data Protection Policy
  • Contact
    • Contact Us
wexfordartscentre

wexfordartscentre

Arts for All, Arts for Life

Tel 053 912 3764

View All Events

You are here: Home / Art Centre Exhibitions / SAFE-HOLD by Christine Mackey

SAFE-HOLD by Christine Mackey

July 16, 2020 by Wexford Arts Centre

SAFE-HOLD
A solo exhibition by Christine Mackey
at Wexford Arts Centre

Online Viewing Room

An opening reception of Safe-Hold was held on Friday 28 February with guest speaker Author and Journalist Paddy Woodworth.

​Paddy Woodworth was a staff journalist at the Irish Times from 1988 to 2002 and is the author of Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013, 2015), which is a worldwide assessment of ecological restoration as a conservation strategy.

The term Safe-Hold comes from the anthropologist Gerard Reichel-Dolmatoff, who studied the cultivation of native Indian gardens in forests. What emerged was the cultivation of temporary plots that secures the legacy of important plants to the tribe whose lineage may be undermined due to environmental stresses. These mobile gardens become ‘safe’ homes for their offspring. In the context of this exhibition, this phrase provides a broad ecological structure that opens a new way of thinking about land, movement, plants, and people and responds to the current crisis of habitat loss. This knowledge is married to Christine Mackey’s deep interest in agricultural practices as an artist, gardener and seed-saver, which aligns her working processes to focus on the interrelationship between plants and all living organisms.

Beekeeper with Combe, 2019, documentation. Courtesy of the Artist.
Spot The Queen, 2019, digital print on dibond, 42 x 59.4cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

This exhibition is one outcome of a public art commission under Wexford County Council’s Per Cent for Art – M11 Gorey to Enniscorthy PPP Scheme (2019), whereby a number of sites with pollinator- friendly plants were sown in Gorey. Mackey worked with local communities to actively engage in solutions for habitat loss and transform underutilized sites into aesthetically pleasing and environmentally sustainable safe-holds that serve as pollinating pastures for our bees to inhabit and for native wild-flowers to take hold. Future plantings are marked for this Spring in Enniscorthy.

Kids in Forest, 2019, pigment print on archival paper,dinond/tray-framed, 84.1 x 59.4cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

In response to the planting of the sites, Mackey developed a body of work drawing from a range of archival, research and material sources. The unique seed mix, for example, used for these plantings triggered her to source the various plants as pressed specimens held at the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin. This process resulted in a series of unique drawings made directly from the herbarium collection. The drawings are presented in the gallery as Risograph prints, from which members of the public are invited to ‘adopt a species’ by claiming a print.

Mackey’s interest in pedagogy and new media in social and public contexts led her to develop a workshop programme with participants from Gorey Youth Needs. The workshops explored key environmental/climatic issues relevant to a young population. This process resulted in the documentation of an unofficial seed planting exercise in a local Sitka forest and text works concentrating on the poetic use of language as political slogans. Key works from this series are presented in the upper gallery.

​
Christine Mackey, based at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, was educated in fine art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and Dartington College of Arts, Devon graduating in 2012 with a Ph.D. from the University of Ulster, Belfast. She completed a Fulbright Creative Research Scholarship Award in 2018 pursuing independent research at institutions across the States including Art & Ecology Department, University of New Mexico; Botanic Gardens Steere Herbarium, New York; Native Seed Savers, Arizona; and WormFarm Institute and GUMZ Peppermint Farm, Wisconsin. Mackey has participated on a number of residency-exhibition programmes including the Museum of English Rural Life, The Observatory SPUD, ArtsSway (2017); and The Politics of Food, Delfina Foundation, London (2015).

She was awarded a GB18 exhibition grant to exhibit new works developed on the Tree Charter Residency Programme, curated and commissioned by Common Ground, England and exhibited at The Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018). On-going projects include ‘The Potting Shed’ (2014 to date) through ArtLink, Donegal, which opened up a new social space inside a defunct military environment. Pressing environmental issues in relation to the geopolitical control of seeds was made evident in the three-year project ‘Seed Matter’ (2010 to date) devised as a series of exhibitions and a publication, with future works in development supported through a Bursary Award from The Arts Council of Ireland.

Safe Hold is currently in-situ in the lower and upper galleries of Wexford Arts Centre. For further information on the exhibition please contact Catherine Bowe, Curator, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +(0)53 91 23754 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie.

Filed Under: Art Centre Exhibitions, Past Exhibitions, 2020

Primary Sidebar

Exhibitions

  • Art Centre Exhibitions
    • Current Exhibitions
    • Upcoming Exhibitions
    • Past Exhibitions
      • 2025
      • 2024
      • 2023
      • 2022
      • 2021
      • 2020
      • 2019
      • 2018
      • 2017
      • 2016
      • 2015
      • 2014
      • 2013
      • 2012
  • D Lush Cafe Exhibitions
    • Current Exhibitions
    • Past Exhibitions
      • 2025
      • 2024
      • 2023
      • 2017
      • 2020
      • 2018
      • 2019
      • 2016
      • 2015
  • Off-site Events
  • Screenings
  • Online Workshops at WAC
  • Touring Exhibition
  • Uncategorized

Footer

Wexford Arts Centre
Tweets by wexfordarts

Cookie Policy | Privacy Statement & GDPR Compliance
© 2025. Copyright Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford. Reg No 306536
Website Designers TwoHeads Logo
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}