I combine drawing, painting, and sculpture in visceral works
about the collision of fear and anxiety with domestic space, the body and more recently, the landscape.
I work with painting to explore its material properties first and foremost. Paint’s propensity to drip, smear, puddle, pool and coagulate provides a visceral interaction with a substance that is fundamental to my interests in dualities between control and chance, beauty and ugliness, the clean and the dirty, the material and the support, as well as between the material and the image.
My secondary concern is the subject matter within many of the works. Working from anxiety-inducing found photographs or writing about topical subject matter, I choose elements from these sources as the foundations for a process-based painting or drawing.
My practice is one that combines a commitment to materials and studio work, but also to an examination of cultural theory. This work is influenced by ideas found in a text such as Formless: A User’s Guide and Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo as well as recent publications about fear and anxiety at the turn of the twentieth century.
Rebecca Donald 2010