Shona Macdonald

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.shonamacdonald.com

City / State: South Hadey, MA

The paintings in Sky on Ground record my observations of images reflected in water. Cropped by the edge of puddles, parts of the landscape are displaced as fragmented, truncated images (mainly buildings and trees) that reflect back at us. Through both illusionism and inversion, disorientation occurs. The bits of sky, trees, clouds, and buildings edging into the puddles remain out of view, yet through reflection their physical absence suggests an uncanny presence. This is a metaphor useful to my thinking about how our human experiences are shaped by and through place. Because painting inherently fuses imagery together on a flat surface, it is the perfect vehicle with which to explore these ideas. The sky is on the ground in these works as much as the ground is on the sky. I employ diptych, triptych, and multipanel formats to suggest transformation and time, and I work in layers of viscosity to make the material itself resemble the thing I am depicting.