Siobhán McDonald’s practice draws attention to contemporary topics dealing with air, breath and atmospheric phenomena, weaving scientific knowledge into her art in a poetic and thoughtful manner. Siobhán works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. This ritualized process gives form to a range of projects which consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time. Her work with glaciers and other natural phenomena deploys a unique artistic language that gives form to intangible and richly varied processes including painting, drawing, film and sound.
Cosmic Gas (2021) is a drawing and lithography series that fuses materials devised from poisonous invisible methane gas and explores ideas of what manages to live in the ruins we have made. The project examines delicate ecologies and co-existence between the lungs of the earth, humans and plants as the permafrost melts and slowly releases toxic gases into our air. The works have a living and dark presence made from the direct imprints of plant fragments collected from bog sites that used to be living organisms and have eventually became gaseous. The work is rooted in the medieval mythology of boglands as a cultural preserver offering an insight into ancient pagan times. The strange landscape of boglands with many rare geographical features and occurrences explains for the large mythology surrounding it. Tim Robinson, a celebrated writer and cartographer remarked of an Irish bog “Mind is being reabsorbed into matter; humanity’s imposition of languages, order, meaning, is being sucked down and choked off by nature.” Maybe it is this mysterious timelessness that placed the bogs as reminders that we are not mortal. That we are made of the same material.
Siobhán McDonald developed a series of artworks during a residency hosted by GLUON and part of the STUDIOTOPIA project. All works examine particles floating in the air and matter buried underground from past worlds. In an exploration of Arctic permafrost and plants preserved in this depository, the project traces histories of generations of underground systems. Starting with boglands as its protagonist — their ecosystem, history and mythologies — the project considers ideas around time and the preservation of collective memory in that thin layer between soil and rocks, where some of the most important changes in contemporary times are taking place.
Explore the other artworks of this project:
