Lucie MacGregor: Footnotes

Lucie MacGregor is an artist that moves between various materials and narratives, exploring collaboration as a way to reconnect people and place. Translating mark-making and drawing through sculpture, she often invites others to remap spaces as an act of reclaiming personal geographies through collective gesture. As a social practitioner, her interests move between ecology and local exchanges, recycling materials into curious formations blurring the etymological roots (the origin and historical development of words and their meanings) that ground our everyday objects.

Footnotes is a new installation by MacGregor, created following a series of collaborative workshops with local people in Wakefield. Using and interacting with a collection of viewfinders and spotting devices made with the artist during workshops in October 2021, these handmade sculptural tools encouraged participants to identify, signpost and document markings, objects and textures they found in the urban landscape of the city.

Each participant was asked to search for interesting aspects of colour, shape and architecture, and note down these real and imagined findings into a floor-based collage. Crayon rubbings of pavement patterns were woven together with shapes referencing specific buildings in the city and the desired green presence of more parks and nature. Photographs, drawings and other materials found during the workshops were gathered by the artist and participants, and were collaged together to create a new and alternative map of Wakefield.

MacGregor translated the collective geographies experienced during the workshop to create a new large-scale floor-based artwork titled Footnotes, installed in The Ridings. The Project allows visitors to experience a new way to see the city. Audiences may spot their own drawing within the artwork or recognise a street marking which may have gone unnoticed beneath our feet, until now.

The project opens on 24 November during Artwalk, and will remain on long term display.

Read a Q & A with the artist Lucie MacGregor here. 

Commissioned by Artwalk Wakefield, supported by The Art House and The Ridings Shopping Centre.