Kiran McKinnon studied at London's City & Guilds School of
Art, before returning to New Zealand in 1995 to attend Auckland
University's Elam School of Fine Art, where she completed her
Masters in Fine Arts (1st Class Honours) in 2001.
Following several years of work in the UK, McKinnon returned to
Elam in 2007 to undertake her Doctorate in Fine Arts.
McKinnon's work explores the nature of perception and its
relation to human experience, provoking thought on how we 'create'
our reality through perception and how art can lay bare the
constructive mechanics of perception.
Often utilising unconventional and highly mechanical
production
methods, McKinnon creates abstract fields of spray that
pulsate and undulate in a random yet rhythmic manner. The pixelated
effect of these spray works is a visual taunt - without a definable
subject matter, McKinnon's audience is left with a blurred field of
vision, a collection of particles from which to create an image, a
visual experience unique to them. It is this celebration of the
ambiguity of perception that McKinnon uses as a response to a
number of fundamental philosophical questions - that we create our
own reality through perception and that in doing so, we give
meaning and form to what might objectively be termed a random
collection of molecules.