Artist Mackenzie Thorpe was born in the industrial town of Middlesbrough, England in 1956, where his father worked as a laborer and his mother as an auxiliary nurse. Life for the Thorpe family was no different to that of most of their community - at times a struggle.

Mackenzie acknowledges mixed emotions about this period in his life. He remembers the strong feeling of community spirit, the warmth and humor that flourished in the face of adversity, as well as the loneliness and isolation. The need and compulsion to draw was obvious from an early age. As a child, he would seek out whatever raw materials he could find, drawing on cigarette packs with stubs of pencils, or using eye-shadow and lipstick illicitly obtained from his mum’s ...