Associates

Steve Dutton (he/him)

@Steve Dutton Artist

Steve (GB; ENG) is an artist and occasional curator based in the South West of England, where he holds a studio at Spike Island in Bristol. His practice spans drawing, performance, sound, moving image, and text, with a particular focus on exploring the intersections and overlaps of language, space, and time. While Steve has worked in various collaborations, he is currently developing a new solo body of work titled ‘The Phantom Industry.’

His work is characterised by its fluid movement between media and conceptual frameworks, engaging with the acts of reading, drawing, painting, speaking, writing, and imagining and might be best described as language-based art.

Individual and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally including a recent commission for the Fluxus Museum Experimental Video Prize in Parikia, Greece. As a co-curator, Steve is known for creating collaborative environments that challenge some of the conventions of the curatorial process.

In addition to his artistic practice, he is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Bath Spa University and has held several Professorial and research related appointments in Art, including positions at the University of Lincoln, Coventry University and Sheffield Hallam University.

Steve’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal involves working with Tracy to support The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy.

Keywords / Space, Language, Time

Maree Hensey (she/her)

@Maree Hensey

Maree (IRL) is a visual artist, collaborator and facilitator. Her practice spans drawing, print, moving image, sound and installation. She has a rhythm to how she works, looks and listens. Her creative processes have a focus on repetitive, meditative, immersive experiences, slowing down and paring back. Drawing is deeply rooted in her practice. The act of drawing is an assertion of freedom and her individuality. She draws on every surface inside and out. The materials she engages with articulate what she is communicating through her work. They are the tools that give form to the invisible, suggesting meaning without fully defining it and above all articulating the beauty of possibility. Her current work explores memory, loss, subliminal and haunting relics of her past and present lives.

Maree is a member of The Directory of Drawing Artists (DoDA), the Graphic Studio Dublin, and Visual Artists Ireland. She has received support from the Arts Council Ireland and Fingal County Council, Ireland, Artists Support Scheme. She has recently featured in talk.drawing, a platform for interviews and artworks by contemporary drawing artists. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Her recent collaborative work centred on an advocacy driven project amplifying the voices of children and young people impacted by domestic abuse.

Maree’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal involves working with Tracy to support The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy and developing drawing-related projects.

Keywords / Drawing, Collaboration, Facilitation

Antonio Forte

Website

Antonio Forte (USA) is a composer, sound artist, and educator from Rhode Island. He creates process-driven, research-based music to tell stories, build sonic worlds, and explore identity. His ongoing scholarly research utilizes Linguistic Archaeology and Experimental Ethnomusicology to unearth the individual, communal, and wider cultural stories of the ancient Samnites of south-central Italy, and to bring the “dead” Oscan language back to life through both instrumental and vocal music compositions.

Studies include Fine Art at SACI in Florence, Italy and he holds a BA in Music from the American University in Washington, DC, where he also studied sculpture, and an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT. He is a teaching artist of both music and visual arts and is a guest lecturer/performer nationally and internationally.

Antonio’s compositions have been performed by groups including Aurora Chamber Orchestra, The City of Tomorrow, Hapax Trio, Mobius Percussion, INTERFERENCE new music collective, Quince Ensemble, and Trio Lunaire. He has created scores and sound design for art galleries, installations, documentary films, podcast series, and theatre productions.

His forthcoming serial podcast, Sounds Like Words, documents creative conversations with the past and with others, including academics, archaeologists, artists, linguists, musicians, writers, and storytellers and culture-bearers, as he unearths, dusts off, and breathes new life into a dead language, forgotten people, and lost stories.

Antonio’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal includes facilitating workshops on deep listening techniques, soundwalking, and using soundscape creation as a way to investigate inner and outer landscapes.

Keywords / Sound, Composition, Art

Fernanda Aránguiz M. (she/her)

@Fernanda Aránguiz M.

Fernanda (CL) is a publishing artist and independent curator. Her artistic research focuses on experimental publications and written language as a graphic form and representation scheme of ‘the real’, an issue that runs through her creative production. Since 2016 she participates in art book fairs and exhibitions linked to books and art publications, in talks and workshops related to publishing as a practice and books as artworks, and in the production and curatorship of collaborative and interdisciplinary art projects. In 2020 she developed the research project Publicar como práctica…, from which she edited and published the book PUBLICAR (2021), a collection of textual, visual and graphic reflections on publishing as an artistic practice in Chile, and created the publishing house and web platform publicarcomopractica.com. 

Fernanda’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal is working with Tracy to produce new publications and offering practitioners and researchers creative and practical advice about potential publishing projects, and access to a network of relevant international professionals and organisations.

Keywords / Publishing, Writing, Practice as research

Esméemilja Mackenna (they/them)

@esmeemilja.studio

Esméemilja (GB-SCT, IT, NL) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Orkney and, when their body allows it, in Collemacchia, Italy.

While studying BA Hons Fine Art with the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland the trans, disabled artist is envellopping painting into their practice, to join their love for storytelling through photography and videography. Esméemilja uses photography to share their relationship with their ever-changing body, as well as that of others in the local queer community. The emerging artist has found the process of painting to be an important aspect of their research into mythology, gender and both human and non-human stages of life. Their practice investigates internal and external societal experiences, intersectionality and folklore, while working on crip time.

As a neurodivergent and chronically ill ambulatory wheelchair user, their activism and creativity have become fundamental aspects of their survival and navigation of their trauma and current experiences living in an often inaccessible island.

Esméemilja’s Associate role in Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal focuses on photography, place-based research, programme development and accessibility. Esméemilja’s level of engagement fluctuates determined by their illnesses.

Keywords / Folklore, Gender, Illness

Giovanna MacKenna (she/her)

@Giovanna MacKenna

Giovanna (GB-SCT, IT) was an actor and a journalist, and is now a poet and creative facilitator. She is Poet in Residence for the Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Anti-Infectives Research, University of Dundee and also part of the creative team working on Scotland’s Covid Memorial project. Giovanna’s poem Silenced by My Mother’s Tongue is included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems list. Her first collection is available from The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing. 

Giovanna (GB-SCT, IT) was an actor and a journalist, and is now a poet and creative facilitator. She is Poet in Residence for the Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Anti-Infectives Research, University of Dundee and also part of the creative team working on Scotland’s Covid Memorial project. Giovanna’s poem Silenced by My Mother’s Tongue is included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems list. Her first collection is available from The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing. 

Giovanna’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal across 2025 is Poet in Residence. New writing is being published regularly on the Blog section of this website and on social media.

Keywords / Poetry, Transition, Endings

Hilary Nicoll (she/her)

@Hilary Nicoll

Hilary (GB-SCT) is an artist and curator who has worked in Higher Education, leadership and advisory roles in the contemporary visual arts in the UK for 30 years. 

Now a Senior Lecturer at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland her creative practice and academic research focusses on positioning the familial archive as a site of object-memory inter-relationship, with a focus on material collected by her late father, Andrew Nicoll, architect and jazz musician, before his death from Alzheimer’s in 2016.

The collection and its location become a place of encounter between objects and art making, unlocking both the personal and the universal. It activates ideas of the museum and its relationship to memory loss and retrieval. It is a space in which to reevaluate modernist architectural practices and utopian ideologies, and through it, psychogeography and the works of writer W G Sebald foreground thinking on war, trauma and loss.

Hilary’s blog ‘The Museum of Dad’ (2012-15) and the subsequent exhibition The Museum of Memory at The Barn in northeast Scotland in 2016 are the starting point for this research, that is evolving into an interdisciplinary practice that traverses curating, writing and printmaking.  

Hilary’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal across 2025 includes co-devising practice and research events, exhibiting and publishing.

Keywords / Archive, Collection, Object-Memory