tender land: Shona Macdonald

September 11 – December 16, 2021

tender land, features drawings and paintings by Massachusetts-based artist Shona Macdonald. In her Sky on Ground paintings, Macdonald depicts observations of nature and the built environment reflected in ground water including fragments of imagery that often lie unnoticed beneath our feet. “Cropped by the edges of puddles, I noticed parts of the landscape were displaced creating truncated images of buildings, posts and trees looking back up at us,” says the artist.  In the diptych, Sky on Ground # 17, the pristineness of Macdonald’s reflected skyscapes—which seems to hover in a monochromatic gray expanse—is interrupted by the curved pattern of road markings.

The artist’s Ghosts series is a group of delicately rendered drawings. In three works, including Ghost Large #12, the artist has used silverpoint, a transient medium whose tone changes over time, to depict an array of shrubs shrouded by transparent landscape cloth. The protective fabric obscures details of the plants and creates isolated, draped masses that seem to float on Macdonald’s polished white fields.

 

SHONA MACDONALD (Scottish). Ghosts Dark #4, 2020-2021. Pencil on black paper. Courtesy of the artist.