shona macdonald

artist statement

My recent work uses the visual language of drawing and painting to expand on the semiotic similarities between maps and fractals and to address issues of place, location, memory and land.

The inscriptions in a map register and locate the viewer in an autobiographical notated memory or inspire imaginative longing to be in another place while the spiraling, infinite, self-repeating imagery of fractal coastlines, islands, foliage, and branches ground the viewer firmly in ‘place’. Through this work, then, I attempt to find ways to decode the signs and myths inherent to maps and re-invest their ostensibly utilitarian function with personal narrative. I am interested in the tension between place that is longed for and place that is actualized. This tension is investigated through imagery that is fragmented then seamed back together and layered paint phenomenologically hovering and floating across surfaces, pinned in place by grounded linear markings.

From afar, the dense imagery populating my work resembles rough aerial topography. Up close, the small, clustered signs and symbols ‘come into focus’, revealing ‘place’ more literally. Snowflakes are likened to islands; mountains to shells. Counties and isles cluster together forming new landmasses and globe-like structures. Rivers and roads mutate, web-like, into branches. Branches become breaking waves. It is my intention that these conflations of memory and place provide both a new lexicon of experience for the viewer and an understanding that true connection with place lies beyond the parameters of mapped terrain.

Shona Macdonald, 2006