The Greenwich-based artist captures energy and movement in her works, to dazzling effect

BY BEN WEST

Just a glimpse of Sally McKay’s work shows that she is especially skilled at capturing movement. It is clear that central to her artistic practice are the moving figure, rhythm and energy.

“I have always been interested in the moving body, and movement,” she says, talking from a Woolwich cafe under a vivid blue sky, overlooking a peaceful River Thames. “It doesn’t have to be dance, but could simply be people walking around. I think capturing movement through art really connects with people.”

Sally has lived in the area for 27 years, first in New Cross, and then in Greenwich, raising a family in the process.

“It’s a great place to be an artist,” she says. “There are many artists in the area, and hundreds of small studios too.”

Many local artists have studios in buildings filled with small studios. These include artists’ charity Art in Perpetuity Trust’s A.P.T. complex in Deptford, with 42 artists’ studios; Art Hub Studios in Deptford and Woolwich; Cockpit Arts in Deptford; SET in New Cross, Woolwich and other locations in London; and Acme, with studios in Deptford and Peckham as well as numerous other locations in South London.

The Artworks Creekside in Deptford has some artists and craftspeople, and the complex where Sally is based, Thames-Side Studios in Woolwich, claims to be the largest single-site studio provider for artists and creatives in the UK, having more than 500 studios on its seven-acre site.

Sally focuses upon live performance, in particular dance as a stimulus. She was a Fine Art and Dance graduate of Goldsmiths College.

“Goldsmiths was alive with creativity then, in the 1980s, and the drama, dance and art students would often collaborate on projects, which I’ve continued to do since,” she says.
Upon leaving Goldsmiths she worked commercially as a senior designer and art editor in film and publishing for 15 years, attending sculpture classes to work with clay in the evenings because she missed the tactile process. She later gained a Fine Art MA from City and Guilds of London Art School.

Currently Resident Artist at Greenwich Dance, Sally has worked with many award-winning choreographers and dance companies, sketching during rehearsals. She loves having residencies with dance companies, regularly attending sessions in a dance studio, watching and recording their creative process through drawing, and then working up these free-flowing drawings into paintings, sculptures in wax or wire, or printmaking.

Etchings comprise much of her work: “Rather than use a hard or soft ground to create the etchings, I favour the spontaneity and alchemy of directly painting onto zinc plates using sugar lift and spit-bite, with aquatint,” she says. She has increasingly been moving from focusing on the craft of etching to creating monoprints.

With everything happening so quickly in a dance rehearsal, this kind of work, capturing fleeting moments of movement, requires immersing herself in the performance and allowing the drawing to unfold and flow. Transcribing motion and stillness, balance and falling, solitude and chaos, into a series of marks on paper, she tries to be aware of everything: movement, rhythm, light, shadow, tension and release. She has also worked with other forms of movement, such as boxing. And still lifes, tulips and other flowers: but even then, she seems to give them energy and movement.

Her artists’ practice combines with teaching and art therapy. She has taught art workshops and classes to all ages, and has worked with people who have suffered traumatic head injury. She has been involved in Move Dance Feel, a London community project uniting women affected by cancer through the physicality of dance.

She exhibits regularly across the UK and abroad, and her etchings are held in the V&A and Scarborough Museum Print Archives and in collections in Madrid, New York and London. A series of her life-size wire sculptures were used in a Spanish advertising campaign, and a wire sculpture of hands linking fingers featured in an advertising campaign for Swiss Watch brand Baume and Mercier, with the sculpture displayed in Harrods and in New York, Singapore, Dubai and other cities across the world.

She’s found, like many artists, that Instagram has proved a great way of promoting and selling work these days: that it has an international reach is all for the better.

The pandemic has clearly – and unsurprisingly – influenced her work, and she feels that the absence of touch has been a large and damaging side effect of the coronavirus. She has recently produced monoprints of an isolated woman, a series entitled ‘Alone Not Lonely’, and others entitled ‘When We Could Touch’, and ‘We Are Miles Apart’.

But with increasing signs that the pandemic is hopefully fading away, she is looking forward to the world opening up again.

“Collaboration is invigorating, and it will certainly be good visiting art exhibitions again,” she says.

Further information: sallymckay.com

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Black + Green Magazine