GATHERING
October 27, 2018 - February 16, 2019, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University
Curator Marian Casey's live intervention in Gathering sought to provide a new lens through which to examine Scottish artist and designer Francis Macdonald’s (1873-1922) oeuvre.
The project was created as an intervention in Gathering at Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. To accompany the exhibition Exploding Collage, collaborators Julia Heslop & Ed Wainwright presented Gathering, an architectural intervention designed to host the work of other artists, as in Kurt Schwitters’ Hannover Merz Bau, which concealed niches dedicated to his artistic heroes. Likewise, Gathering was comprised of an interconnected sequence of ‘grottoes’ assembled from found and given material, each of which will be dedicated to an artist whose work deserves to be reconsidered in relation to collage as an expanded, immersive or time-based practice.
Casey created a micro-tattoo studio, holistically inspired by Macdonald's designs, inside of Heslop and Wainwright's architectural intervention. In collaboration with Evan Paul English – a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary visual and tattoo artist - a small design based on Frances Macdonald’s work was offered for tattooing on the heel or ball of grotto visitors’ feet. These are the parts of the body where tattoos are the most temporary, and the rate at which the tattoos fade differ depending on how calloused the feet of the visitor are and how much time they spend on their feet. In this way, the body and action of the visitor participated in the collaging of Macdonald’s legacy, acting in both the reframing/restoration and the erasure of her work, as the tattoo gradually faded.
The project explored collage as a manifestation of temporality, absence, and the collision and unification of disparate elements. It is a reinterpretation of Macdonald’s work as collage through vision and practice, a meditation on gender and cultural memory, and as an experiment in collage-making itself. The space of the grotto acted as a living collage, as the designed space, the body of the curator, and the bodies of visitors all move together to push together/pull apart as a total collaged work.
Frances Macdonald was part of the Glasgow Four, a group of artists, designers, and architects that comprised of herself, her sister Margaret Macdonald, Margaret’s spouse Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Frances’ spouse Herbert MacNair.
The Glasgow School of Art is credited to Mackintosh alone. However, the first half of the building was designed when the Four still worked together in Glasgow, with Margaret and Frances' work nearly indistinguishable and Margaret beginning to have an influence on Mackintosh's practice. Glasgow School of Art suffered destructive fires in 2014 and 2018, and, most importantly in the limitation of Macdonald's legacy, MacNair’s destroyed most of Macdonald’s work after her death.The repeated physical destruction and rebuilding of Frances’ legacy mirror the cycles of erasure and rediscovery visited upon women artists by the fashions of art historical discourse.
If we define collage as creation of an artistic whole through experimental use of non-traditional, unexpected disparate elements, Macdonald’s work, both individually and collaboratively with the Four, embodies collage through its material state, method of creation, conceptual underpinnings and creative influences.
Read an interview with Gathering curator Madeleine Kennedy, including a discussion of Marian's project, in Aesthetica Magazine.
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