Kenneth John Macklin

Macklin, Kenneth John
Kenneth John Macklin, sculptor (b at Edmonton, Alta 1952). One of several constructivist sculptors who emerged in Edmonton during the 1980s, Macklin studied sculpture and ceramics at the University of Alberta from 1972-78 and advanced sculpture at St Martins School of Art in London, England in 1979. He has also attended international workshops at the EMMA LAKE ARTISTS' WORKSHOP; the Triangle Workshop in its inaugural year at Mashomack, NY; the Triangle Workshop in Barcelona in 1987; and the Phil Berman Sculpture Workshop in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1993. In 1994-95 he made an extensive study of Mayan sculpture and architecture in the Yucatán.

Macklin's abstract sculptures tend to be frontal and pictorial, like substantial drawings or paintings. He is unique in his ability to work with essentially the same motifs at any scale, from tiny ceramic table sculptures in porcelain to enormous steel constructions. His rising, fanlike constructions of the 1980s developed into lateral sequences of relatively anonymous curved parts in the 1990s. Macklin's extraordinary ability to build overall configurations from side-by-side attachments may account for both his poetry and mastery of scale. His work can be found in public collections in Edmonton and St Albert, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and Lehigh Valley Hospital in Pennsylvania.

Author TERRY FENTON