Carali McCall — b. 1981, Ontario, Canada, a settler born on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabew peoples. Lives and works in London, UK.
McCall is an artist whose practice is rooted in drawing and performance and extends across sculpture, moving image, photography, sound and writing. Her practice began in rural Ontario and, for more than two decades, has examined how the body encounters, measures and belongs to place.
Interested in the role of the body in art today, McCall makes works through actions of movement, repetition, stillness and endurance: running through landscape to inscribe a line through space; drawing continuous circles in graphite during performances lasting two to four hours; or holding a bit of land ( a heavy rock) borrowed temporarily from the surrounding landscape as an act of sustained physical attention. Across live performance, drawing, sculpture and image, the work considers the body as an instrument of measurement and explores the relationship between human presence, material, duration and place.
McCall is represented by CLOSE Gallery, UK; holds a PhD in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and an MFA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL; is a co-author of Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945, published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2020, with subsequent editions in 2022 and 2024, and has contributed academic writing to Routledge.
Recent projects include a live performance during Photo London 2025 and receipt of the Innovation Prize at the 7th John Ruskin Prize, 2025. Her Circle Drawing and Performing Rock performances have been presented at venues including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Blunk Space, California. Recent group exhibitions include As Long as It Takes: Drawing and Performance at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London (2026), and I Miss the Land but Does the Land Miss Me? at Art Seen, Cyprus.
Solo exhibitions include Intervals of Jupiter: Weight of Things at Gryder Gallery, New Orleans (2023) and INFINITE: Body, Landscape, Alchemy and the Cosmos at CLOSE Gallery, UK (2024).
