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Artist Shona Macdonald
South Hadley, Massachusetts
Sky on Ground #1
Casein and Oil on Canvas
Artist Statement
My current series, Sky on Ground, represents a sense of the everyday. The landscape here in New England closes in, compresses, and consumes the whole sky. Many puddles emerged last year after the heavy snow began to thaw and I started to see the sky again, only inverted and revealed as an image enclosed inside these pools of water. Depending on my vantage point, images of trees and buildings slipped into view. My work acknowledges that reflections in water are a significant part of the history of painting. Rather than depicting reflections as places that evoke elevated or sublime emotional states, however, I focus attention on the puddle as a muddy, melancholic after effect: something we walk over (or in) every time it has rained without giving it a second thought.
I see these paintings as metaphors for re-thinking the pastoral as a lofty place of sanctuary. In a puddle, fragments of the landscape are easily displaced or revealed out of place. Because painting fuses imagery together on a flat surface, the sky is on the ground in these works, as much as the ground is on the sky, heightening our sense of disorientation. Further, the displaced parts of the landscape would have remained outside my immediate frame of reference, had I not deliberately revealed them in the puddles. For example, the trees and buildings edging into the puddles in Sky on Ground, were out of my view, yet the reflection of them invites their presence into the painting. At the heart of this work there is an uncanny ‘doubling’ embedded in the use of reflections that I purposefully employ to exaggerate our sense of dislocation.
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