Calder MacKay is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the emotional resonance of imagery, operating in the space between painting and photography. Drawing from personal and found images, Calder treats photographs not as static records but as emotional objects, fragments that invite reflection, projection, and reinterpretation. His practice questions how best to convey the profound delicacy and intangible shared sentimentality of these found archives. Why can we feel a sense of familiarity in someone else’s past? How does context, memory, and proximity shape our responses?
Reworking forgotten snapshots, a shared glance, the intimacy of silence, the melancholy of a once-familiar place. These are not nostalgic gestures, but meditative acts of reckoning, with loss, care, and inherited identity. Interrogating the cyanotype print as an avenue to which a painting can be birthed through the uncertainty that is intrinsic to this medium. The layering of painting, photography, and collage both obscures and elevates, reflecting a desire to explore what images conceal and reveal. Often underpinned by questions of masculinity and generational dynamics, his work resists fixed connotations. Instead, Calder treats ambiguity as a generative space where viewers are invited to sit with their reactions, question their origins, and consider why something resonates. The work becomes a mirror, reflecting not just what we see, but what we carry.
Calder graduated with a 1st class BA (Hons) in Fine Art. He was awarded the RSA David Michie Travel Award (2024) and the Boom Graduates Publication Award – which will see his dissertation “‘No man’s land’ – 21st Century Masculinity in Scotland” published as an independent research paper. He is currently studying at The Royal College of Art, London.
