Sally McKay

The moving figure, rhythm and energy are central to Sally McKay’s practice, focusing on live performance principally dance as her stimulus, she captures fleeting moments of movement through drawing figures in real time during rehearsals. The sketches are the starting point in her Printmaking practice. Rather than use a hard or soft ground to create the etchings, Sally favors the spontaneity and alchemy of directly painting onto the plate using sugar lift, sometimes with aquatint.

Over the last 6 months with the absence of live dance to draw Sally has changed her process from etching to monoprinting working from drawings made pre-2020, this feels an appropriate personal response to the pandemic: immediate, spontaneous, somatic, but also reflective, a way of breathing life back into moments from the past.

Sally holds an MA Fine Art, from City & Guilds of London Art School, she is a Goldsmiths alumni with an honours degree in Fine Art & Contemporary Dance and a post graduate diploma in Printmaking. She joined the Greenwich Printmakers in 2014 and is a member of the Printmakers Council. Her studio is at Thames-Side Studios, in SE London. Her studio practice is combined with art teaching.