Maria McKinney
Maria McKinney is a visual artist from Dublin, Ireland
making work through a range of media including
sculpture, installation, photography and video. She
combines hand-craft with response to context,
collaborating with scientists and farmers to produce
projects that explore ideas surrounding genomics and
agriculture. The Sire series is proposed as a rephrasing
of what was once intangible. In pre-Christian Europe,
people annually performed customs in relation to
the reaping and sewing of the harvest. These rituals
have since been popularly interpreted as an attempt
to influence the future behavior of nature. Part of this
practice involved making a corn dolly, an object made
through the intricate handcraft of binding straw with
the final sheaf of that year's crop. Now, we not only
understand these formerly mysterious processes of
propagation, but also manipulate them to our own ends.
This ability is in itself a cause of wonderment; the magic
has become, in a sense, real. The colorful objects on
the back of the bulls are made from semen straws, the
storage receptacles used in the artificial insemination
process. The animals are the bearers of these
ceremonial-inspired sculptures. Together, the carrier and
object coalesce into something strange and entrancing.
