Surface Tension: Shadow Waters 2022

Surface Tension: Shadow Waters 2022

The waters of the Goulburn River flow east past the great rock walls of the Drip, mirrored by the waters of the Cudgegong River flowing west. These rivers and their catchments are connected neither by shared hydrology nor by geomorphology but are profoundly connected...
The Dawn Club 2020

The Dawn Club 2020

‘The Dawn Club’ began with a deep dive into the archive of the Henry Lawson Centre in Gulgong. The archive exists to record the life and work of iconic Australian writer Henry Lawson and consists of photos, artworks, first edition books, manuscripts which reveal much...
Shadow of Proof 2020

Shadow of Proof 2020

Shadow of Proof  is a series of photographic copy prints sourced from public archives woven together to disrupt and question historical modes of representation and reveal the structures of power and privilege that have shaped contemporary society. The archived...
Future Feminist Archive – LIVE! In Wollongong

Future Feminist Archive – LIVE! In Wollongong

Surface Tension – WIWD March 1979, 1 to 9, 2019 Leafing through back copies of Illawarra Women’s Groups newsletters in the Local History archive of Wollongong City Libraries looking for images, information or leads about the first International Women’s Day March...
Pattern Person 2019

Pattern Person 2019

Cementa 19 Poster Engaged by Cementa Inc. to create a feature image for Cementa 19 Contemporary Arts Festival in Kandos New South Wales, the opportunity arose for applying my thinking about Russian Constructivist dance costumes, maquettes and puppets some of which are...
Intervention Roll Back Actions 2017

Intervention Roll Back Actions 2017

“It is time to consider implementing the simple recommendations made by the extensive process that resulted in the ‘Statement from the Heart’. For the ‘proscribed communities’ (there are about 75 in the NT) it has been a hard ten years with no...
Obsolete? 2017

Obsolete? 2017

The Cross Art Projects, Sydney, Aug 12 to Sept 9 2017Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo March 24 to June 17 2018H R Gallop Gallery, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga Sept 10 to Oct 5 2018 For the exhibition, Obsolete? Artist, Object, Small Museum, Fiona...
Future Feminist Archive Report 2015-16

Future Feminist Archive Report 2015-16

Future Feminist Archive at The Cross Art Projects – https://crossart.com.au/exhibition-archive/95-2016-exhibitions-projects/291-future-feminist-archive-report Fiona MacDonald – working with Vivienne Binns’ Full Flight (1981-83), Arts OutWest archive and Charles...
Cenit and Nadir 2015

Cenit and Nadir 2015

[respect for Mariano Rawicz, Madrid: Cenit, 1933]Kandos Cement Works images: Karon GrantPoster prints 100 gsm bond paper, 594 x 841 mm Created for Cementa 15 Contemporary Arts Festival Kandos, 9 to 12 April 2015 Cenit and Nadir, 2015The protagonist, a returning hero,...
Mining Galilee 2014

Mining Galilee 2014

Mining Galilee The tiny Bimblebox Nature Refuge lies within the massive Galilee Basin in Central Queensland. Mining Galilee peels away residues of history overlaying the economic and emotional conflict between energy resources and natural heritage through the use of...
Kandos Sunset 2013

Kandos Sunset 2013

Kandos Sunset, 2013. Installation: 14 x oil on canvas, video – duration 0:12:28. Video Production: Moon Cube Design. Dimensions variable. Kandos Auction Map Kandos Sunset, 2013. video (still) – duration 0:12:28. Video Production: Moon Cube Design....
Agshow 2012

Agshow 2012

Agshow 1956 for Feminage. Backstory and forwardstory The Feminage exhibition is the first in a series of three annual exhibitions accompanied by three roundtables to guide a proposed new National Feminist Art Exhibition in March 2015. Much of feminist thinking was...
Green Bans 2011

Green Bans 2011

Local Studies: Democratic Domain It is now over 30 years since The Rocks, Victoria Street, Woolloomooloo, Centennial Park and Kelly’s Bush and more were saved by the Green Bans. The Green Bans were strike action taken by the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF)...
Twining Portraits 2011

Twining Portraits 2011

Twining: Weaving and Abstraction, curated by Fiona MacDonald and Karen Mills for 24 HR Art, Darwin from 11 February to 19 March 2011. An exhibition of work by Debra Dawes, Karen Mills and Robyn Djunginy and Fiona MacDonald exploring cross cultural exchange through...
Local Studies: Legend and Legacy 2010

Local Studies: Legend and Legacy 2010

In Wollongong MacDonald reinvents historical imagery to dramatise civic life both past and present. Abstracted drawing and restrained colour washes lend a bittersweet nostalgia to the Legend and Legacy series. Nostalgia — from the Greek, literally ‘pain of...
Drawing the Line Between Native and Stranger 2010

Drawing the Line Between Native and Stranger 2010

Botany Bay and glittering Sydney Harbour remain the most popular single signifiers of Australia to the world. The coastline linking the two harbours is the first sight of the New World for many new arrivals by sea or air. The print folio Drawing the line between...
Drawing the Line 2010

Drawing the Line 2010

The project and print artwork Drawing the line between Stranger and Native explores the legacy of Botany Bay as white Australia’s foundational site. In April 1770, two vastly different civilisations met in a large estuary originally called Kamay (Gamay) when a...
Tongue and Groove 2009

Tongue and Groove 2009

Fiona MacDonald tells difficult archival stories — of local nobodies, worthies and outright bastards — who make regional Australia both singular and crushingly familiar. Her starting point is her hometown Rockhampton built by the world’s richest goldmine at...
Hello Joe 2009

Hello Joe 2009

USAAF 1, inkjet prints, 60 x 80 cm, 2009 USAAF 2, inkjet prints, 60 x 80 cm, 2009 USAAF 3, inkjet prints, 60 x 80 cm, 2009 Artwork source images courtesy: Mercer Studio Portraits from the Central Queensland Collection, Rockhampton Regional Council...
Mosquito Divan 2009

Mosquito Divan 2009

Fiona MacDonald set out to research and create a ‘portrait of a people’ living in a mid-sized Australian town as time unfolds—using local photographic treasure troves and collections found in and around her hometown of Rockhampton. Eminent art historian...
Lobby, Fold, Spin 2007

Lobby, Fold, Spin 2007

MacDonald & Subritzky – New York City Exhibition SeriesFrom March 14 to May 5 2007, Fiona MacDonald and curator Ricky Subritzky will collaborate on a series of three installations in New York City. Entitled Lobby, Fold, and Spin, these provocative installations...
Mass Movement 2007

Mass Movement 2007

Mass Movement 2 (UEP 2), watercolour on paper, 76 x 105 cm, 2007 Surface Tension 4 (London 1), watercolour on paper, 76 x 105 cm, 2007 Surface Tension 7 (New Delhi), watercolour on paper, 76 x 105 cm, 2007 Surface Tension 6 (London 2), watercolour on paper, 76 x 105...
Strangely Familiar 2005

Strangely Familiar 2005

For Strangely Familiar, curated by Ricky Subritzky, Fiona MacDonald with Fiona Hall contemplates home making and home security, possessions and dispossession. It enfolds us in intricate, insidious and repetitive patterns, bringing together old and new relationships...
Across the Square 2003

Across the Square 2003

Mianjin ngatta yarrana (Brisbane, I’m going) “We are suffering from the usual annual nuisance created by the distribution of blankets among the blacks. They are congregating in considerable numbers in camps near the city, and as, despite the law, publicans...
Threshold 2001

Threshold 2001

Image info coming soon … Image info coming soon … Image info coming soon … Image info coming soon … Image info coming soon...
Millenium Tympanum 2000

Millenium Tympanum 2000

Millennium Tympanum is the artist’s personal view of local history. Fiona MacDonald turns to many sources to tell her story including artefacts, sketches, family photos and folk memory. Within the triangular tympanum shape reminiscent of ancient Greek...
Field Sports 1998

Field Sports 1998

Field Sports is a set of ten baskets woven from copies of a set of hand coloured aquatints produced by commercial artist John Heaviside Clark. These prints, made in London I 1813 and dedicated to the deposed NSW Governor William Bligh, were part of a series of 100...
Fragile 1996

Fragile 1996

The series Fragile is an example of taking up the threads of an earlier story line: the inter-generational collection begun by Alexander Macleay, Colonial Secretary of New South Wales. An installation at Macleay’s Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney dealt with his...
School 1996

School 1996

All but one of the images used for School  have been contact printed from a set of glass negatives which were made for the Mount Morgan Mining Company since its establishment in the 1890s, by photographers whose identities have not been recorded. The negatives were...
Close 1995

Close 1995

In 1995 MacDonald turned again to her home town as the setting for an allegory about natural history collecting and the expulsion of the Darambal people. Titled Close and installed in the Interpretive Centre at the Rockhampton Botanic Gardens, one work shows the...
Port 1995

Port 1995

Port was created in 1995 for the Phillip Street vitrine windows of the Museum of Sydney. The title of the work refers to the role Sydney has played in opening the Pacific to global commerce and cultural exploration. Modelled on a Maori kete, this basket and panels are...
MOS 1994

MOS 1994

Woven images created for the Museum of Sydney (MOS) on the site of First Government House display MacDonald’s gift for creating harmony from bizarre marriages. In MOS 2 a single androgynous portrait is woven from two inhabitants of the early colony: Balloderree...
Universally Respected 1993

Universally Respected 1993

The Sepia collages in Fiona MacDonald’s Universally Respected- How much of him is I ? series of 1993 employed provincial sources: late nineteenth-century photographs of members of the eminently respectable Rockhampton Club in Queensland, the venue where the...
Mob 1993

Mob 1993

In a review of the 1993 exhibition Mob at Mori Gallery, Felicity Fenner writes:‘The project continues the artist’s interest in the machinations of history-making, drawing largely on found documentation and anecdote…. Researched in Rockhampton, Queensland, the...
Honeymoon 1992

Honeymoon 1992

Honeymoon, Mitchell Library Vestibule, State Library of New South Wales installed for The Boundary Rider, 9th Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney A Dangar Family album that had recently come into the collection of the Mitchell Library, it consisted of...
Botanical Atlas 1992

Botanical Atlas 1992

Botanical Atlas 1, 1992, paper collage, 30.0 x 22.0 x .5 cm. Botanical Atlas 1, 1992, paper collage, 30.0 x 22.0 x .5 cm. Botanical Atlas 3, 1992, paper collage, 30.0 x 22.0 x .5 cm. Botanical Atlas 7, 1992, paper collage, 30.0 x 22.0 x .5 cm. Botanical Atlas 10,...
O Tahiti Nevermore 1991

O Tahiti Nevermore 1991

Exhibited: 17th September to 5th October, Mori Gallery, Sydney. Fiona MacDonald’s exhibition projects have explored the intimate bonds that exist between objects, owners’ desires and the cultural space they inhabit. MacDonald’s earlier exhibitions...
Specimen 1991

Specimen 1991

Specimen 1, (G Lindauer Rewi Manger Maniapeto, 1882), paper collage, 1991, 45 x 35 cm. Specimen 1, (G Lindauer Ana Rupene and child, 188o), paper collage, 1991, 45 x 35...
Cyclopaedia 1990

Cyclopaedia 1990

A site specific project: Alexander Macleay’s Library, Elizabeth Bay House, Historic Houses Trust, Sydney January 1 to 31 1990. Cyclopaedia Exhibition Catalogue –...
Gauguin Suite 1990

Gauguin Suite 1990

Exhibited: 4th to 22nd December, 1990 Mori Gallery, Sydney. Seeing is BelievingIt is rejuvenating to find Fiona MacDonald’s work at the Mori Gallery boldly tackling the processes of perception her collages, titled the Gauguin Suite, question the way we see and...
A Question of Time 1989

A Question of Time 1989

A Question of Time is a series of collage that tracks the archeology of ornament. Overlaying geography with geology, textiles and symbolic ornament. A Question of Time 1, paper collage, 1989, 31 x 23cm A Question of Time 6, paper collage, 1989, 31 x 23cm A Question of...
No More Blue Horizons 1988

No More Blue Horizons 1988

Exhibited: 20th June to 10th July, 1988, Flaxman Gallery, London No More Blue HorizonsFiona MacDonald communicates a sense of wonder of appearances but delights in ambiguity and contradiction. Her large, lurid and almost shockingly convincing collage portraits make...
Presence of the Past 1988

Presence of the Past 1988

Exhibited: 29th November to 17th December, 1988, Mori Gallery, Sydney. Custodian, 1988. Collage of cut photo-offset magazine illustrations. 70 x 50 cm Keeper, 1988. Collage of cut photo-offset magazine illustrations. 70 x 50 cm Collector, 1988. Collage of cut...
Salon des Ciseaux 1987

Salon des Ciseaux 1987

Salon des Ciseaux I Exhibited: 28th July to 15th August, 1987, Mori Gallery Sydney Hero, 1987. Collage of cut photo-offset magazine illustrations. 70 h x 50 w cm Mercenary, 1987. Collage of cut photo-offset magazine illustrations. 70 h x 50 w cm Madame Ciseaux 1,...
The Lure of the Grotesque 1986

The Lure of the Grotesque 1986

Exhibited: 15th July to 2nd August, 1986, Mori Gallery, Sydney. Footnotes to the works from the exhibition room sheet. 1. Grotesque – 1. Decorative painting or sculpture with fantastic interweaving of human and animal forms with foliage; (pop) comically distorted...
Elective Afinities 1984

Elective Afinities 1984

Elective Affinities is a scientific term developed in the 1700’s to describe the chemical attraction of certain substances to each other in preference to others. Used by Johann Wolfgang Goethe as the name for a novella in which the chemical metaphor defines the...
Shard 1983

Shard 1983

Exhibited: 1st to 19th November 1983, Mori Gallery, Sydney Girl, China, plaster and wire, 1983, 39 x 30 cm  Veronica, China, plaster and wire, 1983, 38 x 32 cm Swift, China, plaster and wire, 1983, 34 x 25 cm Africa, China, plaster and wire, 1983, 32 x 26 cm Valli,...