Bio
MacGillivray has walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert, eaten broken chandelier glass in a derelict East German shopping mall, headbanged in gold medieval stocks in Birmingham allotments, burnt on a sunbed wearing conquistador armour in Edinburgh’s underground city, breast-fed a Highland swan in Oxford and regurgitated red roses in Greenland. She remains clan chief . . .
MacGillivray is the pen and performance name of Scottish writer, artist and musician Kirsten Norrie, reflecting her matrilineal highland heritage.
She has worked with The Fall, Thurston Moore, Arlo Guthrie, Arthur Brown, Shirley Collins, Laura Cannell, Dead Rat Orchestra, Jem Finer (The Pogues), Hauschka, Trembling Bells, Olivia Chaney, Current 93, Gallon Drunk and Vic Godard and the Subway Sect. As MacGillivray, she has released eleven records and authored two poetry collections.
Her solo work has been aired on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, The Verb and Radio Wales. She has provided soundtracks for three films by Andrew Kötting, Swandown, By Our Selves and The Whalebone Box. Her appearance in The Whalebone Box prompted Mark Kermode, writing in the Guardian, to invite audiences to ‘hear the poet-artist MacGillivray perform her spine-tingling murdered mermaid song in a church, sounding for all the world like a whale out of water, crying plaintively into the abyss.’
Photo credit: A.R. Thompson
MacGillivray’s website.
