Niall MacDonald--Opal-Logo Palm

Employing the strategies of bricolage, the resulting objects are simultaneously gestural and critical in their composition, juxtaposing the detritus from our commodity-driven culture with ancient fossils, natural forms from his Hebredean home and the remnants of lost civilizations.

Macdonald’s work at first seems to function compositionally as a still life, juxtaposing images of  fruit, fossils, food and fabric, that take on a eerie sense of capitalist memento mori, forcing us to “remember our mortality” and reminding us of a state of ritual underpinning our experience of everyday objects. However, the work does more than simply translate a painterly language to sculptural one. It inhabits a language and plays with its structure and meaning, removing the central focus of still life, it’s replication of reality, by presenting the cast of the objects themselves, allowing the viewer to focus on there relationships to the objects in front of them.

The detail and subtleties of the cast surface make us reconsider the original object and in turn the origin of its production and the subcultures to which it belonged. A Roman coin, a Kodak disposable film camera, a Rubik’s cube. Macdonald transforms these obsolete objects into timeless fossils, all rendered in the same luminous white plaster - a device which elevates their status as art objects or prototypes, whilst simultaneously stripping them of their distinctions.

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