fiona macdonald

with i.a.b LON since 27 July, 2003

“In earlier works I have investigated behind the aspirational mask of photography for a hidden reality - for what leaked from an image, betrayed it and constituted it as resonant. Now I am more concerned with the idealising urge itself, the way we embellish and reduce, remember and forget, interweave fact and fiction. Photographs can portray an astonishing sense of idyll, which the richness, the play of surface, the commingling of real and imaginary afforded by painting can at once enhance and perturb. If the particular mergence of fiction and reality in which we reside as children recedes in adulthood, it does not disappear, and it’s that sense of the overcharged moment that fuels my work. In all the work there’s an oneiric quality, in some a heavier, brooding feeling. The narrative is stilled.

The creation of a space that is somehow other, elsewhere, excites me – a space I want to be at once alluring and somehow disturbing. That in some way we are all flying, diving, or driving into the unknown. In recent works the viewer is invited into landscapes heavy with anticipation, redolent with something we want and can’t have, laced with a certain unease. The nostalgia in some pieces is overtly fabricated. Though there is an affinity with travel (real or imagined) I want these places to speak of home. This longing is a particular nostalgia - aligned to a romanticism that is at once both knowing and pure. Far from being glued to the past, it moves toward the possible.

I use a mix of acrylics, oils, gloss, resin and other things on canvas/board, employing glass and pearlescent paints etc to subtly add glimmer, to entice, yet to suggest falsehood, possibly danger. Though still employing photographs as reference and suggestion my painting is becoming more fluid, more concerned with invention and dissonance, both in the contrast of place and in the materials and surface itself, inviting the eye into the space, to then throw it out to the surface. My concern is to follow the otherness of certain spaces that are becoming visible in the work, while continuing to experiment with materials, perhaps increasing the three dimensionality that is entering into later works – pursuing the duality of illusionistic space versus the materiality of stuff.”

Art Training

1995–1997 MA History and Theory of Contemporary Art – Chelsea College of Art

1989–1992 BA Fine Art (2:1) – Leeds Polytechnic - Specialising in painting

1988 – 1989 Foundation Course – Kent Institute of Art and Design

LONDON - NEW YORK

All rights reserved. Copyright of i.a.b and artists. 2001-2005