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.
In the video installation Methane Lake, Siobhán McDonald paints with invisible methane gas on ancient ice which melts away. The act presents itself as a time capsule of the frequency of the Earth 20,000 years ago, representing the imagined notion
of a time we cannot go back to. The film explores the slow workings of geological processes found deep in permafrost, meditating on the sentience of ice. The artist embarked on an expedition to explore this beautiful and vital Arctic ice which holds a memory that extends for millions of years into the past. By painting on transient matter such as mycelium and ice from different moments in history and letting them melt, the artist wishes to express the infinite concept of Ensō. Ensōs is rooted in Japanese calligraphy and closely related to the concept of wabi-sabi — the Japanese idea of the transience of all things. Ensō is a circle that has since ancient times been written with canes or sticks in mid-air.
Siobhán McDonald developed a series of artworks (Listening to Soil; Cosmic Gas; Methane Lake; Tipping Point) 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:
