Andrew McDonald
~ Declarations
~ Born and raised in Northland ~ Andrew grew up queer in a conservative rural community before going on to live predominantly in London ~ His work seeks to integrate these dualities ~ into objects and images that speak of our times
In this group of paintings Andrew has combined floating faces and animal figures. In his paintings, he negotiates the meeting of edges to push elements forward or draw them back into an ambiguous space. They suggest in-between states, thresholds and transitions that we think no one else knows about, possibilities of unbounded identity.
His ceramic models of animal figures grow and evolve into impossible beings that become at times amorphous. Sometimes he chooses to damage and then re-form the figures, highlighting the question of wholeness and integrity.
In his deeply personal hanging eggbox sculptures, he is responding to grief by connecting it to notions of the broken and the mended, asking questions of ‘what constitutes a whole?’ He has broken the boxes and then reconstructed them through stitching or casting in porcelain, then broken them again to arrive at an object that embodies loss and healing.
The ongoing concerns in his practice are the nature of identity and otherness – seeking through painting to make images that inhabit a world of familiarity and disturbance, using images of animals to explore his fascination with the human impulse to represent our deepest psychological needs through a connection with the natural world.
~ Downloads for this show
