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Fiona MacDonald makes alternate realities, scenarios or details -paintings and sculptures that act together –which are constructed from various sculptural materials, found objects, living and natural organisms. Her work borrows from sci-fi, Romanticism and an overactive imagination as well as the ongoing experience and observation of nature. There is a constant exploratory roving between the act of making, dealing with the nature of the material, and the seductive gazing at or being in nature. She shows a way through the philosophical and aesthetic fracture between nature and our cognitive experience of it. |
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John Holland’s installations portray a kind of nature that’s at once intimate, romantic, and totally adulterated by man made tat. He uses a plethora of ordinary but out of context materials – sawn timber, plasticine, silicon rubber, gaffer tape, fibreglass, polystyrene, vaseline, house paint, fur, air freshener – making landscapes in which realistic birds and animals inhabit a space toxically laden with barely transformed matter. ‘I assert the primacy of material specificity as a tool against the bad generalities of ideologies, strategies, metaphors and literary interpretations. The job is to avoid everything bar facts, sentiment, and the hope of a little bit of sympathetic magic.’
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