Title: Hive Oracle
Year: 2015
Length: 04:40
Format: HD video
There is some old beekeeping folklore about talking to your bees, telling them everything that is going on in the home, letting go of your troubles, trusting them with your secrets. Anyone can talk to the bees, but not everyone can hear them speak.
Title: Albedo
Year: 2016
Length: 11:12
Format: HD video
Credits: Soundtrack by Rapoon, Storey, R. (2003) Breathing Gold, from the album Fallen Gods (Cidar)
ALBEDO
: a measure of reflectivity :
: alchemical purification :
: spiritualisation of the body :
When delving into realms of the otherworldly, it is sometimes necessary to suspend doubt (even if not to admit belief) so that one can fully engage with the experience. To the curious mind, exploration of a question can be as fulfilling, if not more so, than attainment of an answer. Perhaps art can be used like a scryer’s black mirror, a refracted vision of ourselves that gives us a view into the unknown.
Title: The Pelican Surrenders the Blood of Her Heart
Year: 2019
Length: 16:38
Format: HD video
The final transformational stage in the alchemical process is the Rubedo. It marks the penultimate shift from base matter to perfect gold, the apotheosis of both the material and immaterial worlds. These works explore this intangible experience through the symbolism of the blood, the rose, the pelican and transformation through self sacrifice.
Mary MacGregor-Reid’s work explores otherworldly spaces in the context of performance and the performative. Experiencing the role of the artist as both creator, director and performer – MacGregor-Reid has begun building a cosmology through the linking of objects and ideas, a cultivated web of interrelationships. Her method of working has been flexible; spanning object, live performance and video, but always with a focus on the performative. Ritual as performance seemed an appropriate space to interact with the otherworldy, while also allowing the work to quite naturally manifest across a range of media. Working with the performative – particularly recorded performance – she has discovered a method that allows for the sublime, the unnerving and the amusing to exist side by side in a contemporary art context. It has been an evolutionary process, with branches on her ‘cosmology tree’ growing and joining to create a scaffold of ideas and symbols. This has been a process of uncovering, or discovering, these interrelationships as much as it is of creating them. MacGregor-Reid completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2016, she was a finalist in the Glaistor Ennor Awards (NZ, 2016) and had had her work shown at Art Ache (Auckland, NZ, 2016), Buratti Galleries (Perth, Australia, 2016) and Kingsize (Auckland, NZ, 2018). In 2017 she talked at the City Gallery in Wellington, NZ for their international “Occulture” exhibition. Her subject was ‘The embodiment of character in art and the occult”. In 2017 she went to Finland for a month to take part in an artists residency at Arteles Creative Centre.