Christina Mackie is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist. Best known for her sculptural installations, her work explores the complex interactions between colour, pigment and the natural and material. These themes are ever-present in her new piece, The Filters, which is on show now at Tate Britain.

Mackie’s interest in light and colour is evident in her first piece, the beautiful and striking installation of coloured silk nets suspended from the ceiling over lilypad-shaped pans of coloured dye. Clarrie Wallis, the curator of the exhibition, explained that Mackie 'liked the character of the south Duveen gallery and the way the light illuminates the space. The nets were very much made with that in mind. When I am in the Duveen gallery, I almost feel as if I’m underwater: the lights become the waterline.’

In the open space of the gallery, sunlight pours from the windows and illuminates the red, yellow and purples of the silks. You feel like you’ve stepped into a giant laboratory of colour, mid-experiment: the pools of dye have only just begun to crystallise and ripple with the footsteps of the passers-by; the funnel-shaped silks give the impression of colour pouring from the ceiling, a work still in progress.

Natural and man-made worlds collide in The Filters. The title of the exhibition is suggestive of both shades of colour and scientific processes, and this is visible in Mackie’s installations. How do colour and science interact?

The second installation is a bright yellow frame, holding large test tubes and white silk nets. Wallis explains: 'the sculpture makes me think of a strange piece of marine equipment, waiting to be brought into use'. This concept of 'waiting to be brought into use' seems threaded throughout the exhibition, and the installations appear as research-in-progress or suspended moments in time.

This is the draw of Mackie’s work: it feels fluid, with its experiments mid-flow and full of the promise of movement.

The Filters is on at Tate Britain until 18th October. Admission is free.