Clementine Stoney Maconachie

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Clementine Maconachie is an emerging visual artist living in Sydney. Her sculptures embrace the beauty of imperfection and contrast hard materials with soft shapes. She works predominantly in metal and natural stone and strives to find beauty and simplicity through organic lines and shapes. Maconachie is most known for her irregular abstract totems of stacked colour block shapes.

‘Stoney Maconachie’s unusual technique involves using her own body weight as a tool to create irregular shapes from industrial materials. ‘There’s no heat involved, it’s all cold bent. It’s very physical work,’ she explains. While she always visualises an outcome before starting, nothing is sketched out beforehand. ‘I usually have a clear idea, but there isn’t necessarily a specific plan. Sometimes I just play with the materials and see what happens — it can be very meditative.’ The results are crumpled and folded forms made from steel, aluminium, brass and mixed zinc. Once the pieces are completed, she treats them all differently — some are left bare while others are powder coated or painted with a chalky finish.

Inspired by materials first and then form, Stoney Maconachie is now experimenting with Hebel — a high-performance aerated concrete used in building — to create totems, carving and hand-sanding individual pieces that are then stacked vertically. ‘I’m heavily inspired by tough materials and how I can turn them into organic shapes. I love steel, brass and all the metals, but I’m also very drawn to the aerated concrete I’m using at the moment,’ she says. ‘Sometimes my work is a very logical process, other times it’s abstract chaos.I don’t see steel as a hard, cold material like a lot of people do. Mostly, my work is about making hard materials appear soft, like paper. It’s not like the more traditional, harsher approach to steel, my version is more gentle and organic.’