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 supporting The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy.

Keywords / Space, Language, Time

Antonio Forte

Website

Antonio (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. Additionally, he supports The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy.

Keywords / Sound, Composition, Art

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 supporting The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy and developing drawing-related projects.

Keywords / Drawing, Collaboration, Facilitation

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)

@ezmackenna

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

Katia Nethercot (she/her)

@katia.the.human

Katia (GB-ENG) is a landscape architect, gardener and self confessed nature goblin. She is a discipline connector, straddling the worlds of landscape design, water engineering, and edible or medicinal plants. Some of Katia’s academic research explores the concept of ‘The Commons’, particularly relating to food growing spaces.

Having spent time in construction and civil engineering, her interest in natural materials encourages structural play, leading to design influenced by a fusion of function and a comforting aesthetic.

The healing powers of land and nature inspire artistic exploration through mixed media, sketching being a grounding and freeing practice. Nature is also central to Katia’s poetry, photography and ritual making. Her video ‘MTHR’ was presented during the Trame di Luna Festival in Filignano, Italy and she continues to develop poems and self portrait photographs relating to her experiences.

She is currently on the Pathway to Chartership with the Landscape Institute, UK through 2025 – 2027.

Katia’s involvement with The Museum of Loss and Renewal involves supporting The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy. Additionally, she is designing and hosting a place-based garden workshop addressing both The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s needs and those of Collemacchia’s local residents.

Keywords / Landscape, Nature, Art

Marie Salinger (she/her)

Website

Marie (AUS) is a visual artist and educator based in North East Victoria, Australia. Her practice spans painting, printmaking, drawing, collage and photography. Marie’s work transcends direct representation, using gestural lines, heavily textured surfaces and layered forms to contemplate notions of transience and healing. Her works are deeply personal, reflecting inner landscapes where art, nature and emotional experience intersect. 

She carries a layered sense of place and belonging that deeply informs her practice. Her work explores the intersection of landscape, memory, and abstraction and how environments absorb traces of human presence and transformation over time. Working primarily with acrylic paint, natural pigments, and monoprints created from gathered organic and found materials, she allows chance to guide the process, mirroring the unpredictability of natural systems and ecological change. The resulting works function as contemporary palimpsests: layered visual fields where past and present, material and ephemeral, coexist.

Marie is a member of The Mayday Hills Arts Society and The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), Australia. Her recent collaborative work with sound designer and musician Dan West at the Murray Art Museum Albury, Australia, explored the theme Solas (Gaelic word meaning light) examining light’s presence and absence as a metaphor for joy, grief, and the complex emotional spaces that exist between them.  

In addition to her artistic practice, Marie holds a Bachelor of Education in Visual Arts and has taught extensively across a range of educational settings.

Marie’s role as Associate with Tracy Mackenna Studio / The Museum of Loss and Renewal involves supporting The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s residents in Italy.

Keywords / Art, Landscape, Time