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

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. Her poem Silenced by My Mother’s Tongue has recently been included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems list. Giovanna has been Poet in Residence for the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research at University of Dundee and is part of the creative team working on Scotland’s Remembering Together Covid Memorial project. Her first collection, How the Heart can Falter, 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 as 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, 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

Sanne Vermij (she/they)

@sjoekiestudio

Sanne (NL) is a designer and artist, and producer in performing arts. They have worked as a production manager in multiple fields, including music, art education, museums, film, documentary and theatre. 

They are focussing on their practice in fashion and costume design which is intertwined with notions and questions surrounding ecological sustainability, class access and queer culture. New collections are inspired by genderqueer identities and by the liminal space of the shore, considering discarded and found materials and their colours. They work with second-hand fabrics and materials, sourced at markets, shops and donated. 

Sanne’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal dovetails beautifully with their practice. They take care of things behind the scenes such as marketing, have contact with residents, produce and organise events, and much more. They love to be a part of the residency programmes, contributing to the trusting dynamic of individual and group relationshps and drawing inspiration from the work, activities and the residents.

Keywords / Community, Sustainability, Interweaving