Summer, 2003
review
Terrain at Julie Baker Fine Art
By: Lindsey Westbrook
Shona Macdonald doesn’t have much use for frames. Her works on paper are pinned to the wall, all the better to show how she has rumpled and worked over their surfaces with paint, pencil, ink, and collage. She uses an even broader range of materials for her works on canvas (and wood, linen, Masonite, and plaster), applying layer after layer to create delicately beautiful, intensely textured compositions.
Repetition, a crucial element in Macdonald’s past work, is no longer central in the new series she calls “Terrain.” Her primary concern now is with mapping, and the creation of visual affinities among different topographical features, such as rivers and roads, oceans and mountains. Her abstract painted geographies are based partly on her memories of specific landscapes and partly on maps. Some refer to the United States, like Route 55 (2001). which traces her daily commute from Chicago to Boomington, IL. But most images include a map of counties of the United Kingdom, chopped up and rearranged into different configurations. These works are also partly autobiographical— Macdonald grew up in Scotland—and it’s easy to read her painted terrain as rugged, craggy, and any other romantic adjective commonly ascribed to the Scottish landscape.
But Macdonald is careful not to be too literal, or to take herself too seriously. Bodies of Water, Rivers Become Roads (2002-03), for instance, includes not only what appear to be oceans and rivers, but little swimming pools, too, and trees that are actually collaged cutouts from preprinted tissue-paper tangerine wrappers. “Terrain” may be grounded in nostalgia, but it also manifests a healthy dose of imagination.
©2003 Lindsey Westbrook