shona macdonald

Excerpt from Chicago Sun Times December 9 2005, Review by Margaret Hawkins

"Making maps, like art, is a way of staking out one’s place in the world, and both endeavors require the kind of creative optimism found in Shona Macdonald’s map-like drawings now at the Chicago Cultural Center.

It is no accident that maps intrigue Macdonald, who came to Chicago from Scotland10 years ago and stayed. Like every émigré, hers is a story of travel and memory, and for an artist this reorientation of one’s physical world is especially important to the visual imagination. Add to this mix the fact that Macdonald’s homeland is a place of islands, peninsulas and thousands of miles of coastline, and you begin to understand her work.

Macdonald diagrams imagined places that derive from but do not resemble the locales that inspired them.

She invents coastlines by tracing the real coastline of Scotland as well as borders of Midwestern locales then ‘unfurling’ or bending them to make up plausible aerial views of non existent islands. This highly process-oriented technique of borrowing from real topographical maps creates the illusion of time, travel and documentation as sometimes happens in old books where a made-up map introduces us to a place that only exists in the writer’s imagination. In Macdonald’s case, the invention is not literary but visual, though she sometimes incorporates surprisingly literal detail, such as tree branches, that bring us back down to earth.

Macdonald doesn’t label these maps. They are maps of her mind’s travels, which paradoxically, because they are not personalized, seem very real."