m a r s h a m c d o n a l d

A contemplation on the landscape of the house of prayer, and the woman who founded the Order therein, where I stayed August 2016. 

Una contemplación en el paisaje de la casa de oración, y la mujer que fundó la Orden en el mismo, en el que el año 2016 Me alojé en Agosto.

© 2016 marsha mcdonald

This is an overview of work and themes of work.

Water is physically or metaphorically present throughout my practice. Here, I translate my ongoing experiences of viewing one northern American river through 4 years and 4 seasons into an interrelated video series, using the spiritually significant numbers (108, 99, 59, 36) often associated with the rosary and St. Michael's chaplet, misbaha, and mala. The idea of the use of beads as walking meditation, as an awareness practice in everyday life, is as my daily work of walking and being with particular bodies of water.

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.

            Recent paintings are of waterfalls, often intimate in scale, and rapids found in northern American winter rivers. My pictures are  multiple, split or paneled gestures, segments of a whole, episodic. I am thinking and feeling a kind of real site and imagined water/landscape numeration, the over and again, a "though" and "perhaps" conversation with specific watery places.      

                                                                                                                         images 2016 © 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.

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.

Digitally unaltered images of light during the night upon and in the Sakai River, Japan. This is an urban river, enclosed, contained, yet for me an expansive and expressive field of movement at night.

 
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 lived next to this river, walking along it. It is an ordinary river, and such ordinary places deserve attention. They can teach us about looking, liveliness and the spirited movement of things that surround us..

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. 

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

 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.

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