Shona Macdonald: Terrestrial Vale

Terrestrial Vale is an ongoing series of works on paper by Shona Macdonald depicting fledgling plantings enshrouded by winterizing nets, a familiar sight near the artist’s western New England home. Delicately rendered in silverpoint, the nets convey a sense of abandonment, absence, and ghostliness. On the other hand, the makeshift protective coverings are hopeful symbols of human resourcefulness and invention. Isolated and at odds with their surroundings, these figurative structures become metaphors for our increasing sense of dislocation and displacement from the places in which we live and work.

Silverpoint provides a faint ‘ghostly’ delivery of image to paper. Macdonald is interested in how the medium’s diaphanous affect suggests memory or what Marvin Carlson refers to as ‘ghosting’ – “seeing something we have seen before.” This idea is further emphasized by the billowing shapes of the nets themselves, which resemble the outline of imaginary ‘ghostly’ shapes hovering within the landscape. Silverpoint itself is a material that morphs over the course of time from a cold silver into a warm sepia tone. In that sense, it echoes the growth-and-decay cycle of the fragile, tended plants the artist has chosen to depict.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.