This month, we had the opportunity to chat to North Cornwall-based artists Alastair and Fleur Mackie about the duo’s exhibition Projected Outcomes, currently on show at KARST.
Please introduce yourselves.
We are a collaborative artist duo based in Cornwall. Alastair grew up in a farming community in South Cornwall, while Fleur’s childhood was spent between Cameroon, France, and the UK. We met at art school in London in the late ’90s, and our individual practices gradually evolved into a close collaboration. Since relocating to North Cornwall in 2011, the landscape has become central to our work – shaping both our thinking and material vocabulary. Our practice tends to begin with found materials – objects shaped by natural processes or displaced by human activity.
All works featured in Projected Outcomes include found or repurposed materials from the coastline. Tell us about the process of selecting and gathering these materials.
Our process is slow and observational – a long-term engagement with place that is as much about noticing as it is about collecting. We spend time walking the same stretches of coast repeatedly, looking for materials that carry evidence of their own history: how they’ve traveled, where they’ve come to rest, and what forces have shaped them. These materials often arrive with the tide and are selected as much for the questions they raise as for their physical qualities. Gathering becomes a way of thinking and of developing a deeper relationship with the broader ecological, industrial, and cultural systems that brought these objects into being.\
When configuring works within the landscape, such as Four Stacks (2024) and With The Past On The Left And The Future On The Right (2023), to what extent do the surroundings dictate the finished work?
The surroundings are fundamental – they’re not just a backdrop but an active participant in the work. In both cases, the forms and arrangements were shaped by and in direct response to their sites, working with the terrain, light, weather, and the specific qualities of each location. We think of these interventions as temporary alignments – formed in dialogue with the place and recorded at a specific moment in time. The landscape determines the form the work takes, while the work gives something back to the landscape in return.
How does the gallery context shape the meaning of works on show at KARST?
The gallery setting removes the stimuli of the wider environment, allowing the material relationships and embedded ideas within the works to come forward. We see the gallery as a kind of frame – not neutral, but focused and quietly charged – that supports this shift in attention and enables a different way of reading the works, both in relation to one another and to broader themes.
Do you prefer making work within the landscape or in the studio?
Each serves a different but complementary purpose. The landscape gives us material, context, and perspective – it’s where the questions emerge. The studio offers a place to reflect, refine, test relationships, and draw connections. The two are in constant dialogue, but our work begins in the landscape and that’s where we prefer to be. It has a grounding effect, opening the mind and creating space for new ideas to take shape.
Where do you see your practice moving next?
We want to spend more time with these ideas – following threads we’ve already begun, and giving unresolved works the time they need to unfold. Preparing Projected Outcomes has helped us tune in more closely to this body of work, and we want to build on that momentum. We’re particularly interested in how the work might open up different kinds of dialogue – both in the landscape and outside conventional exhibition formats.
Projected Outcomes is on view until 26 July (Wed–Sat, 11am–5pm). Alastair and Fleur Mackie will be in conversation with KARST’s Head of Programme Ben Borthwick on 12 July (12–1pm).
