In 2004, Mac Love was selected as a Royal Scottish Academy Artist to be featured in the National Galleries of Scotland. As Love’s second consecutive selection for that honor, he produced a month-long unscripted performance titled Resilience, which centered on the story of a sink Love found while walking home.

Resilience intentionally sought to disrupt the gallery space and engage visitors in conversation about personal, cultural, and creative matters. The performance explored the diversity and merit of creative expression, and asked visitors to consider the nature of fear and our values.

Mac Love performed Resilience for one hour every day for the four weeks of the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition. In Love’s words, “It was crazy, wild, terrifying, hilarious and beautiful. I’ll never forget some of those conversations. It was amazing.”

In 2002, Mac moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to pursue his MFA at the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and audit classes at St. Andrews’ Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (I.T.I.A.). One of his early MFA assignments was an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of Architecture and the Department of Sculpture. Mac’s collaborators were international students who arrived at ECA one week before the exhibition.

Mac hosted a welcoming dinner at his apartment a week before the show and conceived of a mass-blindfolding performance that they called Fulfillment. They contacted ECA and secured permission to operate the wine table, and used it to distribute custom-made blindfolds to all attendees. Before the exhibition opened, they blindfolded all of the sculptures.

Fulfillment was a huge success, with more than half of all attendees participating in the social experiment throughout the evening. At one point more than 80 people were simultaneously blindfolded for more than 8 minutes. When you blindfold yourself, your other senses take over and fill in the gaps. You can hear beauty, feel authenticity, and recognize an entirely different dynamic of interpersonal communication and understanding. Following the exhibition, we learned that Fulfillment was the first in the history of the Edinburgh College of Art to earn artists an hourly wage. It was sensational experience, and one Mac looks forward to replicating in the future.