Conversations with Blue Mcright

Today we’d like to introduce you to Blue Mcright.

Hi blue, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Curiosity has always been my inspiration and has led me on some wild rides, especially as an artist; first as a painter and more recently as a sculptor and installation artist. As both a wilderness lover and urban dweller, the through-line for my life and work is investigating paradox, danger, mystery, and humor in relationships between nature – particularly issues related to water and the ocean – and a culture of extraction.
62 days, 12 hours, and 17 minutes: that’s how much time I’ve been underwater in the last twenty years since beginning to scuba dive. There, I am literally immersed in my subject matter and unmoored from gravity. Diving has changed my life, prompting me to explore the world’s oceans and incorporate what I see and learn into my artwork. I have become an activist artist, expanding my prior use of found objects to include plastic trash: gathering it, utilizing it, and talking about it.
My mind is in the gutter; constantly looking for plastic straws, elastic hair ties , and other ubiquitous items in the streets and on the beach. Along highways and at gas stations I gather fallen urban fruit from the filthy orchard of our consumer culture. I insist that plastic trash such as salvaged nets, rope, straws, and other objects can be beautiful as material for artwork, forcing us to confront the possibilities of what we thoughtlessly discard, giving agency to the rejected as it assumes space in the realm of cultural dialogue, alluding to what is overlooked and wasted.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Uncertain income.
Bias against women.
Not enough time in the day.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My world of art-making is deeply immersive. I cross the wires of intention and chance to see what will happen, and the resulting shock rings me like a bell. I am struck, hollowed out, reverberating, transfixed until interrupted by dinner or some other distraction, whereupon my reaction is and always will be “five more minutes.”
I am dedicated to creating a visual, metaphoric language about water and the ocean, synthesizing years of witnessing the undersea wilderness as a scuba diver. In ways that are provocative, but more poetic than didactic, my work engages with major environmental issues including drought, sea level rise and ocean plastic pollution.
Like an octopus, each of my arms has its own brain. The thoughts in my hands guide me: knotting and tying, cutting, sewing, and binding, I make each sculpture in cycles of repetition and improvisation. In addition to salvaged plastic, I utilize fishing nets, fish and crab traps, and bait baskets; though porous, they carry the weight of phantoms. Each has a quirky asymmetry brought about by prior vigorous use that I respond to. They speak to life and death, capture and escape, despair and elation. They enable my formal and narrative exploration of transparency, weight and weightlessness, color, texture, and volume.
The ultimate meaning of my work resides in engaging viewers while remaining elusive, in making personal and poetic connections to the conflict between nature and a culture of consumption. It speaks to our present era of the Anthropocene. It makes no predictions as to its outcome.

Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Luck happens.

Be ready.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bluemcright.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluemcright

Image Credits
Alan Shaffer
Marcie Beigleiter