Fiona MacDonald uses the techniques of collage and weaving to disrupt and question historical modes of representation. She has often worked with social and natural history collections and archivally sourced images to reveal the structures of power and privilege that have shaped contemporary society. In the early 1990s MacDonald began her ‘portrait of a people’ project which critically examined Australia’s colonial past and brought to the fore the experiences of people otherwise excluded from our history.

MacDonald’s earlier works held elements of what was to come. In her well-known Cyclopaedia series installed in Alexander Macleay's Library, Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney in 1990, she interrogated the Enlightenment’s taxonomic classifications of the natural world and associated notions of inclusion and exclusion that underlay the European discovery and colonisation of Australia and the Pacific. In 1993 during a residency at the Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, MacDonald researched the people who lived in the region during the late nineteenth century. While previously she had primarily worked with collage, in these works MacDonald spliced and wove together sepia-toned copies of archival photographs to create a new, composite image, presented in a reproduction nineteenth century wooden frame. In the Universally respected 1993, Mob 1993 and School 1996 series, MacDonald combined images of leading figures in colonial society, for example a judge or landowner, with portraits of marginalised individuals such as mine workers, women, South Sea Islanders and Aboriginal people.

The UNSW Art Collection holds two works from MacDonald’s 1993 Mob series, Mob #3 and Mob #11. In Mob #11, MacDonald has threaded together the portrait of Bishop N. Dawes, first bishop of the new Anglican diocese of Rockhampton, established in 1892, with a portrait of three men from Vanuatu.[i] These men lived in Rockhampton at the same time as Bishop Dawes and may well have attended the little Anglican church close to where they lived in Dawes’s parish. From the 1860s onwards, approximately 60,000 South Sea Islanders, known as sugar slaves, were brought to Australia through force or deception to provide cheap labour for the sugar industry where they worked under harsh conditions. Some Islanders, including it is believed these three men, remained in Australia after the introduction of the White Australia policy in 1901 when many others were deported back to their home islands. The effect of weaving together these two photographs is disconcerting as the eye seeks to reconstruct individual identity as the faces slip in and out of view with the warp and weft of the woven image. This visual entanglement ruptures contemporaneous social hierarchies and quite literally inserts these three men back into the frame of history.

Born in Rockhampton, MacDonald undertook undergraduate studies in Brisbane and Adelaide. In 2010 she completed a Master of Art at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney (later known as UNSW Art & Design). MacDonald has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas. Her work was included in the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (1992) and in 2016, for the 40th Anniversary of International Women’s Day, she undertook a year-long project which engaged with regional archives and collections to forge connections between diverse feminist histories and current ideas relating to feminism and archives. MacDonald’s work is held in major public collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and collections in New Zealand and USA.

FEATURED WORKS FROM THE UNSW ART COLLECTION

RESOURCES

Fiona MacDonald | artist website