shona macdonald

Excerpt from, Chicago Tribune, 25th November 2005, Review by Alan Artner

"Artists often decide the world is a richer source of images that the imagination. Some then represent what they see while others use it as a germ for elaboration. Shona Macdonald has done the latter in selections from five years of drawings at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Macdonald, like many artists today, is interested in maps, which she traces, manipulates and repeats to create new forms still related to mapping systems but more involved with her won experience. Shapes of islands, for example, might become floating islands that seem viewed through clouds from above and connected by webs of lines meant to indicate flight routes or a record of visits.

These pale drawings in pencil and gouache stake out a position between representation and abstraction, sometimes leaning more one way, at other times inclining more toward the other. The same happens with elements of landscape such as mountains, craters and shells that Macdonald assembles or elides to cascade down each sheet. Ostensibly representational images continually cross the line to abstraction even as we read the forms as trees or branches or rocks or eddies.

Borrowing a word from the poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins, the drawings are called ‘inscapes’, which tell us these fragile personal essays strive toward essences and epiphanies."