Groundwork Series: In conversation with Tyrone Mckie

Tyrone Mckie is a visual artist based in St. Mary, Jamaica. They work across various media, including painting, collage, photography, sculpture, and video. Their work explores themes of identity, their relationship with nature, and the world at large. Wattle and Red Earth sat down with Tyrone to explore the ways their visual art engages with sustainability, heritage, and creative expression, especially as it relates to rural life.

Wattle and Red Earth Collective:

Your drawings often return to images of rural home life. What first drew you to these spaces as a subject, and how has your perspective on rural architecture evolved over time? Tyrone Mckie: The first real pull towards depictions of rural home life began with the loss of my childhood home. After it was demolished two years ago, I found myself processing that grief by documenting the life around me. I sought to preserve and honour memories of home and the experience of rural living. My appreciation of rural architecture has really blossomed over time. I’ve become increasingly attuned to the stylistic and colour choices that characterize rural architecture.

kitchen (2025). digital painting.

WARE:

Many rural homes carry deep histories, whether through their design, materials, or the way they’re lived in. How do you see your work engaging with those layers of memory and lived experience? TM: I see my practice engaging with these elements by having to hold both the physicality/materiality of the spaces I’m creating or capturing, as well as weighing the intangible attachments that exist with places. Considering these elements as key decision points has pushed me to be more intentional about the spaces I create in my work. I think more about the characters in my work (whether real or imagined) and how they interact with the homes around them.

warming hands (2024). digital painting.

WARE:

In much of your work, land and environment are central. How does working with natural landscapes allow you to think about placemaking differently than through built structures?

TM: In observing nature and capturing natural landscapes, I’m able to see how differently, and often how more chaotically, placemaking is in the natural world versus the built world.

The built structures are created with so much order and intention around human activity. Natural landscapes allow me to see placemaking as more decentralized from humans, and see placemaking as not only something humans do, but all of nature. Placemaking in the natural world is often very reliant on the resources that are closest available, and involves a lot of connection with the environment around you, which influences how the elements interact. Natural landscapes offer so many more sporadic ideas of placemaking.

WARE:

Farms and rural landscapes often carry symbolic weight — ideas of labor, sustenance, and heritage. How do you navigate those meanings in your art?

TM: Those ideas are central to my art, as I grew up with my parents farming and saw the products of hard work and harvest from an early age. In the same way I try to contextualize and think about my subject’s way of navigating space, I also try to capture the people and landscapes I depict in an honest way, honouring them and their lived experiences, even if it has surrealistic sensibilities. I try to capture little nuances of rural landscapes in my work, reflecting the culture and heritage I’ve witnessed.

once boys, now men (2025). digital painting.

WARE:

If you think of your drawings as proposals or visions of space, what kinds of futures for rural or outdoor living do you hope they might inspire for artists?

TM: I hope that they inspire futures where we’re living more closely aligned with nature, and able to incorporate more nature into our built environments and creations. I hope it inspires a future where people gather around nature to appreciate and honour it with more regularity. One inspired by nature in design and rooted in sustainability.

untitled study (2024). digital painting.

The WARE Collective is accepting donations to help build our Living Museum — centered on natural materials, sustainable practices and traditional methods.

Please visit the link to donate: https://jm.wipay2.me/v1/to_me/the_ware_collective