Alastair and Fleur Mackie on London, Cornwall, materials and process

e-interview Rupert White

I understand you're based in the Delabole area of North Cornwall now. What's your background and how did you both find yourselves here?

Yes - home is a small cottage near Delabole, not far from Tregardock beach.

We were both born in the same year but had very different upbringings. Ally grew up in a farming community in the south of Cornwall, while Fleur’s childhood was split between Cameroon, France and the UK - she was born in a small village in the rainforest, so quite a different starting point, although in both cases there was a close relationship to the land.

We met in London in the late 90s at art school - Ally studying sculpture, Fleur illustration - and ended up living there for about fifteen years. That was really where everything began for us in terms of working together. It wasn’t immediate or very structured - we were both doing different jobs to get by and making things where we could. Gradually that turned into something more consistent, and Ally took on a studio space off Hackney Road.

We left London in 2011. We were ready for a change and wanted start a family, and both of us felt a strong pull back to Cornwall.

We were lucky to find an ex–farm labourer’s cottage on the coast between Port Isaac and Port Quin. It came with a barn which we used as a studio, at an affordable rent, on the condition that we moved out when the Doc Martin film crew returned to shoot a series - for five months every eighteen months. We’d pack up and travelled while they were there, and that arrangement lasted ten years. It was a happy time for us.

At the end of 2021 we moved to a smaller cottage at the other end of Port Isaac Bay, and into a larger, newly built studio nearby in St Minver, which has changed how we’re able to work quite a bit.

 

Untitled (Lansallos) 2010

Can you say more about the move from London? In particular, how did it affect your practice?

The move itself was a big shift, but the most important change was in the pace of things. Everything slowed down - not just practically, but also in how we approached our work. London has a very particular energy, and we were making work within that system. It was a good time for us, but we were young, and caught up in that pace.

In reality, we work very slowly.

Being in Cornwall allowed that to come into focus. We had more time, more space, and fewer distractions, which meant we could follow things through more carefully and let decisions emerge rather than pushing them. The work became quieter, more deliberate, and more attentive to what was already there.

It also shifted where the work begins. Instead of starting with an idea and finding materials to fit into it, the process became more about responding to what we encountered around us. That change still underpins how we work now. More generally, it allowed the work to become less driven by outcome and more by process. It takes longer to arrive at things, but it feels closer to how we want to work.

 

West Cornwall has a lot of galleries and studios, and most of the artists down there know each other. What is it like at the other end of Cornwall? Do you feel cut off? Is that a problem?

Yes, we do feel quite isolated - we’re in the sticks!

Culturally, it can feel a bit removed, and we miss the ease of engagement we had in London - being able to see things, and feel part of a wider conversation. West Cornwall offers more of that, and we visit fairly often. There’s a strong concentration of artists there, and a shared way of thinking that we recognise and feel connected to. It’s something that stays with us when we leave.

But over time, that isolation has built something too. Our relationship with the immediate surroundings has become more personal - quiet, and very direct. We’re on a ridge of high ground between the Atlantic and Bodmin Moor, so we’re aware of those two very different conditions either side. It’s exposed - open ground, very close to the underlying material of the land - and that feels important to us, feeding directly into the work.

At the same time, our way of working isn’t about this place as subject in itself. It’s more about working closely with the specific circumstances we find at hand - a way of paying attention that would apply wherever we were.

So whether it’s a problem - yes and no. It can feel limiting at times, but it’s also shaped the work in ways that feel important.

Canopy (2014-2025)

Can you describe one or two of your earliest 'Cornwall-made' works?

A lot of the work we were making in London was already rooted in Cornwall.

Ally started working with found materials during his BA, including early works using barn owl pellets (photo above (top)). We’d regularly travel back down to his parents’ farm near Lerryn and spend weekends crawling around derelict farm buildings. Those materials would then come back with us to London and find their way into the work. In some cases, once the pieces were made, they were taken back and documented where they were found, so there was already a kind of back-and-forth between studio and site.

Even then, the work was grounded in the conditions in which the materials were found, just at a slight remove.

A piece where that relationship felt more direct was 'Canopy', which Ally made in 2014 (photo above).

It began as a walk - from our home at the time to the house where he grew up - about twenty miles across mid-Cornwall from one coast to the other. Along the way, he picked one leaf from every tree he passed beneath. In total, 3,456 leaves were collected, then pressed and dried. Each leaf was processed into a component and used to form the surface of a faceted, geodesic structure.

The work was commissioned for an exhibition on the theme of home, and that idea runs through it quite directly. It connects two specific places through a simple, physical action, but also builds something new from that journey - a structure made from what was encountered along the way.
 

Stack 6 (2026)

Most of your recent work is a response to the landscape in some way. Can you describe how you made eg 'Stacks' (above) and 'One Mile Line' (below)? Which beaches did you access in particular?

Most of this work begins with time spent in a relatively small area near where we live.

The Stacks developed from coming across large trawl floats lodged in rock crevices along the shore at the north end of Port Isaac Bay. They’re part of a vast industrial system - used to keep large fishing nets open at sea - but here they arrive as isolated objects, carried in by currents and storms.

We set ourselves a simple framework - a two-mile stretch of coastline within walking distance of our home - and began recovering all the floats we encountered along it. At that point we didn’t have a fixed idea of what the work would become; we let it develop from there.

The structures came quite directly from the material. The floats already contain fixing points from their original use, so we began using those to hold the stacks together, allowing their prior function to determine how they could be reassembled. The stacks were made on site where they were found, subject to tide and weather, documented photographically, then dismantled.

One stack led to another, and as more appeared, it developed into an ongoing series.

'One Mile Line' came from a similar process of accumulation, but over a longer period and from the other end of the bay, where this material is deposited. We collected brightly coloured lengths of monofilament fishing line - densely knotted and tangled - then unknotted, straightened, and rejoined them into a single continuous line measuring one mile. Like the stacks, it’s a work that emerges from repetition and collection rather than a fixed plan at the outset.

In both cases, the starting point is paying attention to what’s there, and allowing what we find to form the work.

One Mile Line (2024)

What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment we’re working on a project that has been developing quite slowly over the past few years.

It began with us recovering small amounts of gold by hand from a stream near our studio. The process itself was very simple, but demanding - long days spent working the same stretch of water, gradually learning how to read it. Over a period of nine weeks we recovered a target of ten grams.

What interested us was the trajectory of the material, and the associations it carries. Gold forms through extreme cosmic events - supernovae and neutron star collisions - before becoming embedded in the earth, and eventually appearing in a landscape like this. That long chain of transformations, from astronomical to geological to human, became central to the work.

We’re now working with scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sussex to deposit that gold as a very thin layer onto glass, using a process called sputtering. The idea is to use that gold to produce a new work that will eventually return to the same landscape from which the material was sourced.

It’s still unfolding, but it feels like a project that’s allowing us to bring together a number of strands in the work - material, time, and place - while also opening up questions of scale that feel quite new to us.
 

 https://afmackie.com/