MacKinnon-Day is a Glasgow born artist who focuses on the landscape around us whilst bringing attention to the inequalities and underdogs of the working man and woman. Her work is about portraying her socialist views and illustrating those whose voices needed to be heard. For example, one of her first commissions was in the Liverpool dock area where she planted yellow flowers along a mile’s length of disused dingy tracks near the pier. It may have been reflective of the hierarchical system of the workers who were made to wear different colour clothes to indicate their level of seniority. Or bringing joy and happiness to an area where people suffered. The past ill-treatment of people, slavery and forced emigration, are never far from people’s minds when they look at Liverpool’s docks. This has sad and dark undertones of the power play the workers experienced. I love the imagery in these industrial works, reminiscent of a real-life lowry painting with new vibrancy and life
Another work was in response to the Conservative cuts in 1997 when a psychiatric hospital was shut down with just a week’s notice. The place was left abandoned with record books, minds and lives disregarded. One of the pieces she did in response to this was to replicate the soap dishes left in the hospital: the dishes were lined up with the patient’s names written on a label. The ceramic dishes were printed with the royal crest on it and were just another reminder of the lives and futures which has been abandoned here. The soap dishes were exactly the same as those given to prisoners, but they were given to hospital patients. It’s poignant as it shows that people who were ill and had done no wrong were been incarcerated as if they were criminals when they were actually vulnerable people neglected from society. MacKinnon decorated these soap dishes in glass with light shining up into them, shadowing the patient’s names onto a gallery wall.
I find the way she works so inspiring; bringing light to the smallest of details of a situation and using it as a metaphor for society.