2008
Zoe MacDonell is a mixed media artist, primarily uses drawing, painting, and new media to explore a central narrative. This statement describes my current body of work, Ecstatic Shadows.
"…find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates."
- Junichiro Tanizaki In Praise of Shadows (1933)
CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
My work deals with reality, in particular our understanding of landscape, both personal and physical. I am especially interested in how the physical landscape can mirror and affect the personal landscape. This work questions the relationship that we have to our surrounds and investigates the nature of reality and layers of perception.
My process is focussed on extruding information from these surroundings. I source found objects from the environment and use them as a visual reference within my artistic narrative, where I seek to establish their inherent beauty. My art practice seeks to disclose the hidden story within these items and to reveal them through the observation and replication of shadows.
The shadow references impermanence, memory and distorts the original object. They also reveal the light, allowing us to see beyond the objects themselves. Shadows allow us to divine a certain time and sensory experience in a location. They allude to the unseen, the veiled, and the hidden stories that hover beneath the surface.
Drawings, paintings and film work created from the projected shadows are two-dimensional and allows one to picture or conjure the essence of the three dimensional reality due to the relationship between light and shade. This investigates the relationship between cast shadow and perspective space. We can still divine from the shadow the attitude and feel of a place, and the indication that the subject matter exists in a particular landscape.
ECSTATIC SHADOW: PAINTINGS AND NEW MEDIA
The abstract forms of the shadows are selected from film stills. The film work explores a passage of gently dynamic shadow movements, while my paintings render the same relationship between light and dark, but as an isolated moment in time.
Both the film and the paintings are complimentary in my current body of work, they document the same imagery construct of light and shadow.
The shadows are created in a studio setting from plant remnants found in the natural environment. Light penetrates through these collected objects at different intensities, creating tonal variations and overlapping patterns.
The imagery subtly alters from striking and vivid, to soft and transient. The shadow forms become moving abstract compositions, which are often unrecognisable in origin. They appear mysterious, visually elusive and evocative. Their forms twist and glide across the screen, giving the illusion of 3 dimensional shapes and conjuring a moving, shifting monochromatic painting of light. A static camera position with a singular take creates a sense of stillness in the moving image.
The 2 new media stills included in this site are from Ecstatic Shadow, which will be first exhibited at Bus Gallery (ARI) in Melbourne, March 2009.