ABOUT

Iain Machell trained at Portsmouth College of Art in England, Grays School of Art in Scotland with an MFA in Sculpture from the University at Albany, State University of NY.  


His work has been shown at The Drawing Center, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Center for Book Arts, and Dieu Donne Gallery in New York City, ARC Gallery Raw Space in Chicago, Islip Art Museum on Long Island, and Contemporary Outdoor Sculpture at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, MA. His handmade book Objets Perdus is in the Artist Book Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2015 he completed a Residency at the Platte Clove Preserve in the Catskill Mountains, NY and recent solo shows were at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties NY, and the Unison Arts Center, New Paltz, NY.

His works have been featured in The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, New Art Examiner & Chicago Sun-Times.


Machell is Art Professor Emeritus at SUNY Ulster, receiving the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012. He has been a Visiting Artist to numerous colleges and universities including Parsons School of Art, University of Massachusetts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ball State University.


WORK STATEMENT 

Iain Machell looks at nature to uncover a visually addictive world of shapes, forms, textures and colours. But beneath the surface he finds a raw energy and often a struggle. The forces of pressure, time, and adverse human influences work their way into the tension between 2- and 3-dimensions in these drawings and sculptures. Planar directions, surface texture, wet & dry media are all stitched, glued, pushed & pulled from 2D into 3D to respond to the power of nature.


“Iain Machell’s work explores the tactile presence and possibilities of paper as well as allowing fluid, organic influences in his mark-making media. Materials are bent, stressed and meticulously detailed to create a delicate cartography of space and being. There is a non-objective element to everything Machell makes but there is also a subtle bridge between the object itself and its position of a fractal microcosm of a greater world.”


- Jen Dragon, Curator