Look closer at Sally McKay’s delicate, intricate mandala-like photographs and you’ll see some startling details: plastic figures with plastic guns, plastic observation towers, plastic fighter jets and plastic tanks, all arranged in neat circles.

These figures, ubiquitous in Australian childhood, are still churned out in factories, and children the world over still use them to stage mock battles. But now the toys come with a choke hazard warning, and become plastic waste, killing millions of sea creatures. Each hand-painted work has between 300 and 500 elements of nature and man-made plastic war-themed toy objects, and takes between 80 and 100 hours to construct. With this, her second exhibition, McKay shows the folly of what we’re still doing with plastic, showing this ugliness through beauty.

BIOGRAPHY
Sally McKay was born in Melbourne in 1978 and introduced to photography at an early age. She earned a Diploma of Photography at Photography Imaging College, Melbourne in 1998 and worked as a portrait photographer in Sydney for 10 years before launching her career as a photographic artist. McKay’s artworks are designed to intrigue the mind with their intricate, beautiful details and then draw viewers into an alternative up-close visual arena – one that seeks out the social issues within the minutiae of our everyday environments. She has held solo and group exhibitions across NSW and Victoria.

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Sally McKay / The Blind Radius Series Part II
1
  • August 24, 2019 - October 20, 2019
    8:00 am - 5:00 pm