FIONA MACDONALD
Anthropoflora
20th June - 14th July, 2007

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Fiona MacDonald studied at Leeds Metropolitan and Chelsea College of Art. In 2006 she had a solo show – Habitat – at the Phoenix gallery, Brighton and in May 2007 she exhibited with John Holland in Dirty Nature at the Standpoint Gallery. She is a finalist in the Celeste Art Prize 2007 and has been selected by Matthew Collings for the Creekside Open 2007. Fiona MacDonald’s show at Phoenix Gallery in Brighton involved her carving up the floor tiles to make way for a fibreglass stream filled with live fish and fringed with artificial plants. 10 foot trees were installed between paintings of gaudy jungles with plastic tendrils and flowers reaching out from their surfaces.

In Anthropoflora at Long & Ryle, MacDonald will be focussing more on painting, but the ancestry of these works is important – to notice for example that her sculptures use expanding foam and plastic plants and this mimicry of nature, rather than nature itself, is what is painted. These works – paintings and smaller sculptures – draw attention to the fact that, under the romantic gloss, an artist’s studio and a laboratory are kindred places: neutral (invariably white) spaces where experiment leads to result; where the idealism of making the world anew is countered by a steady observation of reality.

MacDonald’s creations are a distorting mirror of biological science – which puts the messiness of the natural world in the controlled conditions of a laboratory. Where growth is fuelled by nitrogen pellets, 24 hour infra-red lamps, and timed watering and reproduction is by rubber-gloved hand. This is nature rendered impotent; made absurd.

The focus in the new work for Anthropoflora is almost uncomfortably close, at a point where the imagery becomes ambiguous, the plantlike forms merging with suggestions of internal organs or unsettling acts. MacDonald reinvents the tradition of landscape painting by acknowledging Nature to be an active, turbulent space rather than a vista or sublime experience. This overheated environment is echoed by the layered and intertwined veils of transparent paint - where form and colour compete as if in an evolutionary battle for survival. These are eerily beautiful works because they present an artificial, reconfigured ‘nature’ – and in the subtle mimicry there is something threatening whilst still appealing.