Christabel MacGreevy

b. London, UK, 1991

Christabel MacGreevy is a British artist whose interdisciplinary practice is concerned with the symbolic languages of folklore, art history and personal mythology. In MacGreevy’s work—which spans the mediums of textiles, collage, ceramics, printmaking, and painting—she employs storytelling and an idiosyncratic iconography to introduce the sacred into her art.

MacGreevy’s degree show was centered around textile works, inspired by the feminist subversion of traditionally ‘feminine’ objects into symbols of power. She co-founded the clothing brand Itchy Scratchy Patchy, with a focus on embroidery and embellishment, before later embracing a quilt-making practice. Inspired by her grandmother’s studio practice, MacGreevy transitioned into painting as her primary medium, and developed a narrative focus on figures and symbols which populate her canvases and sculptures. 

MacGreevy developed a ceramics practice during her 2021 residency at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she learned about local craft traditions. She began constructing clay sculptures using a range of techniques. While she works with porous terracotta for her figurative vessels, her wall-mounted medallions are made of durable stoneware.

MacGreevy has also spent years looking at the pottery on display in the British Museum, and draws inspiration from storytelling which unfolds across the surfaces of objects used in daily rituals. Combs, plates, and water pitchers are decorated with violent and decadent histories and mythologies from the Roman era, Greece or Abyssinia. MacGreevy embraces these personal and emotional traces of history—belonging to the domestic realm and defined by a shared human experience—rather than their intellectual retellings.   

MacGreevy studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London (2010) and the Ecole de Beaux Arts, Paris (2013), before completing her Postgraduate diploma from The Royal Drawing School, London (2016). Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, both in group shows and solo exhibitions. She lives and works in London.