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Siobhan McDonald

December 2, 2009 — December 6, 2009

Siobhan McDonald

Opening Wednesday December 2nd, 7-9pm

Exhibition Continues December 3 – 6, 2009
Open 2-7pm daily

For nearly a decade McDonald has investigated the fundamentals of place and landscape. Using lens based reference material she transposes the images into studies on place and human experience. Recently she has begun to include the structural elements of walls, grids and deserted sites in her paintings. They act as territorial markers and stand as witness to the passage of time. They become a record of civilization in its various stages of flux and unrest.

During time spent in Venice earlier this year she found a collection of old Venetian printing wood blocks and a set of fifteen century Venetian maps which has inspired a series of work depicting the fragility of the Venetian Lagoon and disappearing places in the world. This discovery led her to employ the structure of layering and methodologies of maps and seismographs into my work.

She is also studying a volcano know as Mount Chance which is on an island in Montserrat in the West Indies. As part of her research she worked in the Observatory with the scientists where the ground movements of the earthquake are recorded in the field by seismometers sited around the volcano. The stations are powered by batteries, which are augmented by solar energy. The signals from the stations are also recorded on paper and give the scientists an immediate view of the current seismic activity. She began to see it as a form of mapping, which has become part of her recent work. The layers of line and latitude create a visual score, which maps the vibration of the earth’s signals.