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

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.

© 2015 marsha mcdonald

This is an overview of work and themes of work.

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. 

© 2017 marsha mcdonald

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

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

© marsha mcdonald

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.

© 2014  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

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 - 2017 marsha mcdonald

 
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 night water, Japanese mended textiles, and spiritual numbers.

            Other recent paintings are of waterfalls, often intimate in scale, and rapids found in northern American winter rivers.

            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 2017 © Marsha McDonald

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

© 2012 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

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

© marsha mcdonald

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

© 2015 marsha mcdonald