M a r s h a M c D o n a l d

A contemplation on the landscape surrounding the Convent of the Poor Clares, where I stayed August 2016. 

Una reflexión sobre el paisaje que rodea el Convento de las Clarisas, donde me alojé en agosto de 2016.

© 2016 marsha mcdonald

Water is physically or metaphorically present throughout my practice. Here, I translated the experience of viewing one northern American river through 4 years and 4 seasons into an interrelated video series, using the spiritually significant number 36, often associated with the r St. Michael's chaplet. The use of beads as an awareness practice in everyday life complements my recorded impressions of particular bodies of water.

© 2019 marsha mcdonald

This is an overview of work and themes of work.

Digitally unaltered images of night light upon and in the Sakai, Onda, and Tama rivers, the Nikaryo Yosui Canal, and neighborhood drainage ditches in Tokyo, Japan. These are urban waters, enclosed, contained, yet for me an expansive and expressive field of movement at night. Since 2015, I have lived next to these waters for some months each year, walking along them. They are ordinary, and such ordinary places deserve attention. They can teach us about looking, liveliness and the spirited movement of things that surround us.

© marsha mcdonald

I am experimenting with  “flush” films (GIFS), short moving images of water.

Lit water strikes me as a tongue, a palpable language, with a visible, written form.

GIFS offer an insight into the beautiful “script of insignificance”, a kind of shorthand (not unlike drawing, cursive, calligraphy), that can be read as the common conversation of urban fountains, streams, rivers, canals and ditches. 

© 2019 marsha mcdonald

Night fluid, moon penumbras, deep winter, north, ice inside water, wind inside ice.

© marsha mcdonald 2019

                  Bronze patinated cups that sound when struck - rough, earthbound things with voice. Each cup approximates a chordal note - c f g. 

© marsha mcdonald

This is a film done for a Ninebark Press 2015 book trailer for novelist/ poet Anca Cristofovici. Music composed by Tyler Marino. Video and book image by Marsha McDonald. Text by the author and Ninebark Press.

© marsha mcdonald

39 small patinated bronzes fill with water. Black stones, black water. Remembrance of fulvic seas and farmland - continuum.

© 2012 marsha mcdonald

We name, natural forces forge local, globally located places of water.   

© 2015 marsha mcdonald                        

n e t (s) is an ongoing meditation and process-based project. I’ve been generously given the time, space and support (from the director, staff naturalist and groundskeeper) to pursue it at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.

I am a resident of Wisconsin but often teach a semester in Japan. There, living at the western edge of Tokyo, I am not far from both farms and forest, laced with rivers and streams. There has been increasing development of this old urban area, echoing the development of my own riverside city neighborhood in Wisconsin. I have thought about change, and opportunity, as well as the conservation of small pieces of nature and water in cities, and the edges of cities. Nets catch or contain or guide in water and garden. They are good metaphors for growth and also death.

The nets are used in small gardens in Japan and for river fishing in China. I placed the first nets in late August (4) early September (2) of 2018. I had the advice of a naturalist, siting them carefully to avoid harming birds, fish, frogs, and bats. More will be added seasonally.

What will I net? Well, gathering from 4 nets in mid-September gave me two curled leaves and a twig. I also found grass and plants growing out and around the nets or fallen brush bowing up to press against them.

But something wondrous, an unexpected echoing, was beginning to happen. Alongside, within, under and above the nets small webs appeared, webs far more effective than mine at gathering what floated, flew or fell into them.

At project’s end, I hope to send a photo of the collection site and small remnants of the seasons’ detritus to 108 people living on 6 continents. I will ask them to respond to their remnant with, again, a small, easily mailable thing or thought, gathering them together into a final net to be exhibited.

This is an ongoing documenting of stones and worn objects - found in fields, streams, rivers, seas, on footpaths and in parking lots, from places on 3 continents. These are the discarded, the walked upon, the unnoticed that surround us.

© 2019  marsha mcdonald

Kaishi Silent Boats

Created for the Venice Vending Machine Tate Liverpool ED Vll, 2018 Each boat contains a scroll with kanji characters for silent wrapped in sea blue cloth. The boat and scroll are tied with silk thread, wound 18 (1_8) times around them. All materials are made in Japan. Origami boats recur in my work. These ten speak to the silences I experience in my life in Japan, silences due to lack of language fluency and a naturally solitary nature.

All ten boats are made from kaishi, a Japanese paper dating from the Heian period (794-1185年). still used when eating, for cleaning one’s fingers, dabbing the face or taking notes. This particular paper is used in the tea ceremony, as a sweets plate, for wiping the rim of the tea bowl and, perhaps, for poems. The paper I chose is made specifically to be used by women. It’s important for me to produce work referencing cross-cultural experiences, events and simple everyday tasks.

Economic need and personal inclination have driven me to live between continents and cultures, never quite at home in one or the other. These canoes are amulets really, symbolically mobile “refugia”, simple objects made from women’s materials of one culture by a migratory women from another.

Sea Amulets

created for the Venice Vending Machine ED V, 58th Venice Biennale 2017. These are 2 6 x 2 cms artist multiples, containing (1) adventurine and turquoise chips, small shell, hardened sand (Sagami Bay, Japan), a copper gilded false indigo pod, a copper gilded origami canoe, wrapped in a cyanotype upon which the Ave Maria is written in Seychellois Creole (Seselwa) and (2) adventurine and turquoise chips, timeworn shell remnant, a copper gilded false indigo pod, a copper gilded origami canoe, wrapped in a cyanotype upon which the Ave Maria is written in Seychellois Creole (Seselwa)

The artist hopes that these amulets protect what inspires and sustains the imagination of those who live near water.

r e f u g e

Created for the Venice Vending Machine ED. III, installed at the 56th Venice Biennale, this multiple addresses the 2015 summer crisis crossings on the Mediterranean sea. The number 1,867 is the United Nations Refugee Council's death count for Mediterranean boat crossings, January through June 2015.

© 2015 - 2018 marsha mcdonald

The Onda River (Ondagawa) in western Tokyo is an outlying urban river, undergoing cautious watercourse restoration. Under the sun, even shadows are penetrated by an intense stellar light.

 
100 small gold leaf boats, with bronze ribs, found buried inside a large clay pot in Denmark. Subiya, Pesse, Noyen-sur-Seine, Dufuna. The relic journeys of life and death repeat themselves. This work is comprised of 1000 copper leaf and painted 8 inch suspended origami canoes. It was begun while my husband was ill and ended after his death. Moments aware, like beads in prayer, become a solitary practice. Folding fragile objects of passage remade and recorded a remnant of a personal voyage. It is an all too human journey, an inevitable watery event.   

Installed for a 2015 invitational exhibition honouring 2015 International Water Day.

            I have begun a new series of paintings, waterfalls, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, night water, Japanese mended textiles, and spiritual numbers.

            Other recent paintings are of small rapids, waterfalls and overflow from gutters and downspouts, often intimate in scale.

            My images are  multiple, split or paneled gestures, segments of a whole, episodic. I think and feel through real site and imagined water/landscape numeration, an over and again, a "though" and "perhaps" conversation with specific watery places.  

                                                                                                                images 2019 © Marsha McDonald

 c y a n o t y p e s     

b o r r o w e d     o b j e c t s    

f l a g    c h a r c o a l    p a p e r    

me t a l    w o o d   w a t e r

            2014年10月25日                                             Studio Kura                                                      糸島（日本）

Studio Kuraでの時計の針の回り方は変わることがないが、農山村なのでチャレンジが毎日あります。朝も昼も夜も毎日同じ音楽の放送で記されていて、時間の経過を思い出します。日が出ても、暮れても、私は洗い物したり、料理したり、掃除したりします。近所の家庭と同じように、これは私の日課です。この単純な三つのこと（料理、洗い物、掃除）は生活の中の聖なる物と日常的な物を表しています。

The cycle of the hours at Studio Kura begin and end with an often predictable but, given the challenges of rural life, not monotonous regularity. Morning, midday, and evening, rising or retiring, I wash, cook, and clean. Like the households around me, it is my ever-present routine. Three simple verbs - cook, wash, and clean -  reveal much about the sacred and mundane in everyday life.

In this installation: on the left, water dripping dry (applied daily to left paper and bamboo sculpture), charcoal, sea salvaged wood and bamboo, folded paper, hemp twine, printed flag, cyanotypes of local deceased woman’s household items (family permission), black, pink and white shaman stones, bowls and bench from her garden

© 2014 marsha mcdonald