School of Fine Art Sculpture & Environmental Art
Finlay Mackay
My practice, which is based in performance video and collaboration, revolves around realness and fakeness as well as stereotypical and performative masculinity. By creating and embodying characters, I am able to investigate the power dynamics between performers, performance and viewer. Often working in parody and self deprecation, my work mimics pre-existing forms, such as wrestling and bodybuilding, while asking the audience to consider a reality in which these things exist in sincerity.
M&S Ghost Tour
Performance event taking place on 29/2/2024, on the last night of the Sauchiehall Street M&S being used as an artists’ studio.
It was around an hour long and approximately 25 people attended. A live performance, then documented in a subsequent publication (this is for sale in my degree show space). I played a fictional “Ghostkeeper” who met the attendees at the back entrance of the M&S, and led them on a narrative-historical ghost tour of the building. Along the way, we met ghosts who brought to life the characters of M&S’ imagined past. The ghosts were played by peers, for example – Laurie as ‘The Outlawed Carrier Bag’. All of the characters appear in the short story in the publication, which weaves together a fiction, inspired by some actual history of the M&S and surrounding Sauchiehall Street area, and the first person perspective of the “Ghostkeeper”.
