The Magic Money Tree

Description

During the election, the shame of childhood poverty, the injustice of the two-child benefit cap, and the rise of inequality were brought up many times. But rather than shine a spotlight on them, the children, young people and families actually affected by these political failures remained invisible and unseen.

 

Mackay was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in a working-class tenement block. Her neighbourhood was beside a more prosperous district, meaning she saw and experienced social inequality from a young age. The experience stayed with her and informed her 2021 project, The Fish That Never Swam, which considered class, isolation, life expectancy and discrimination in her native city. Meanwhile, with My Favourite Colour Was Yellow, several years before the big screen reinvention of Barbie, Mackay questioned how the colour pink is marketed at young girls.

 

Mackay’s viewpoint is that poverty in the UK was a political choice inflicted on the most disadvantaged members of society – first with austerity, then with the steady erosion of the welfare state. Realising that opinion alone would make for a one-dimensional project she took a different approach with The Magic Money Tree and involved her subjects as collaborators and participants in the project.

Here, among Mackay’s own startling images are shots taken by children and young people on film cameras given to them by Mackay alongside community workshops. The result is a provocative juxtaposition of heartbreaking deprivation and the innocence and fun of childhood. “Their pictures give it more colour and life,” she says. “My pictures are more serious.” They are often more overtly political too; encouraged to share paintings and topics that mattered to them, the children are also seen carrying homemade placards, articulating anger and rage in a country that has failed them.

 

The Magic Money Tree is titled after Theresa May’s notorious quote that “there is no magic money tree” that we can shake to rescue the welfare state, pay nurses or provide services (but oddly there was one to bail out the banks). Across 200+ pages, Mackay traces a direct line from Westminster and the decisions made by May’s and other Conservative governments to their impact on four communities across the country. The collection serves not just as an urgent document that politics has real-life consequences, but also as a call-to-arms that change should not be just a slogan.

 

Speaking of The Magic Money Tree, filmdirector Ken Loach stressed the importance of Mackay’s pictures and that they “bear witness to the reality of living in times of hardship and poverty”. But like many others affected by The Magic Money Tree, he also recognises the life-affirming message this incredible book embodies.

 

“To bring up a family in a way we would all wish, to live lives of dignity and security, and with future prospects assured is almost unimaginable for many,” he says. “Look again at Kirsty’s pictures, it is time we recognised our collective strength and made a few changes.”

 

The Magic Money Tree crackles with life, energy and injustice.