Painting as mending structure: Landon Mackenzie in dialogue with Jacqueline Davidson

Abstract

Illness and memoir come together in the handwritings of people struggling to overcome illnesses such as cancer, where the writer collides with established narratives such as “winning the battle”. Faced with an illness with no tidy or clear diagnosis from 2001 to 2005, Canadian artist Landon Mackenzie turned to painting as the logical language to help unravel and depict her hunches, nervous system research and experiences in a series of works called Houbart’s Hope (2001–2005), as well as other new works on canvas or paper. The studio is her place to think, not the keyboard. Using her skill set as an experienced artist, her condition forced her to work in new ways, while she used the “text” of images, colour and form. In her large-scale canvases, which are over two by three meters each, complexity itself was foregrounded. She very slowly was able to create a group of major new works. Using her cartography research, and in particular the historic search for the Northwest Passage from 1611 to the twentieth century as a parallel to her own understanding of the unknown, “brain as a new frontier”, she engaged her artistic methods to understand an illness with no pre-established narratives or images as she recovered. She made a memoire of illness none the less. Mackenzie refers to painting as a mending structure.

Keywords

• mapping
• painting
• visual memoire