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Lyndsay McKay is a Bio-Artist, living in

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

My work explores the porosity in the boundary between the seen and the unseen. By recognizing the liminality of the space between public and private, I seek to understand more deeply, how differently our histories and experiences position our bodies in relation to the spaces we inhabit. More specifically, I am interested in the interconnection of intimacy and care with the incursions and violence of daily life.

 

In thinking about the perception of a landscape and how a landscape may be individually experienced, I find myself embodying the process of becoming aware. I become curious. I move around and under and through the spaces I visit. I bushwhack using my senses as my compass. I crawl through windows that hold a placement between other worlds; like channels and valves – internal, external. I become both the venous system and the blood itself, circulating and shapeshifting, carrying the regard for vitality. I lay low and I hide, I pull spear grass from my shoelaces and throw it like a broken fingernail. I poke my head up when the coast is clear, or only when I want to. I rub up against mirrors that reflect back other surfaces. These are surfaces with scars and stains; exaggerated traces which represent a passage of time. Scarring, in my work, becomes an unavoidable point of confrontation for me. Knowing these marks are there turns my concentration away from location alone, and toward the acknowledgement and certainty of the existence of a blemished human body.

 

Though journaling, photography, and sculptural process, I take an empathic approach to caring for spaces I visit. Beginning with observing sensorially: the action itself becomes a reminder of contamination, of decay and forgetting, of afterimage and misunderstanding. Like dust or darkness, there is a place for certain kinds of observances within the omnipresent boundary between the seen and the unseen. With this knowledge, I set out to become more familiar with existences that have been swept to the edges; ones that have settled into cracks or are sitting unprovoked. These circumstances become like sidewalk fissures or hydro poles - walking past them requires little effort from me, but still, they lead me toward the margins of my own awareness. Rhythmic and reliable - they became a part of a broader rulebook that quietly governs how I come to know: they are important if I think about them, but not if I don’t.

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