Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Heather MacDonald
Article 37 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the July 20, 2005 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Speaking in Stone
As a young child in Prince Rupert, Heather MacDonald collected stones when the tide went out. Even then she was weaving stories, imagining lost civilizations from the smallest finds. A delicate web of wild grass, a granite boulder cracked to its core, a nest suspended as if on air - the landscape spoke to her. To this day she cannot walk through the Gatineau Hills without seeing the storied imprint of Mother Earth etched in the rocks.
A mixed-media artist who creates eloquent tableaus out of stone, MacDonald incorporates and juxtaposes elements to convey a sense of quest - both personal and universal. "I work in layers. I want to help people to see the wonder of Nature more deeply, to explore different aspects of the Self through the presence of these stones. I want to reveal an eternal landscape shot through with fragility. And finally to inspire an intuitive connection with the Earth - to understand how inextricably we are linked, and therefore responsible to the planet."
MacDonald's family moved in 1971 from B.C. to Wakefield when she was ten. She grew up running the booms and swimming every day in the summer. It was at Philemon Wright that she first recognized her need to create - a gifted art teacher, Fran Charlebois, encouraged her. Initially destined for Kinesiology at Waterloo University, MacDonald discovered the Fine Arts Studio during a campus tour. "I suddenly realized - this is who I am. This is what I want to do."
And so began her quest to answer that eternal question why do we have this innate need to express ourselves? - a quest that would soon take her back and forth, over a ten year period, to study the standing stones and petroglyphs of Western Europe, Japan and Canada. "I was drawn to the earliest cultures for clues, to explore abstract expression in stone - to see and feel the cup marks and inscriptions in context."
Throughout her research, MacDonald continued to distil her own work, initially painting the textural properties of stone on canvas. "I had observed, felt and studied stone for so long - now I wanted to sculpt it." She took a year in Italy, learning how to handle the hammer and chisel.
"Then I knew it was time to come home. I needed my family, my roots. I was drawn back to the Hills because this place sings to my spirit."
Marrying and having her three children has deepened MacDonald's understanding of creativity. "My work and my children keep inspiring me. Now I am able to express a more profound message of human connectedness through stone. A rock opens in my hand. A plant has grown there, etched into the heart of it. I may have carried that stone for ten years waiting for it to tell me its story. It finally does - but only when I am ready. That is the mystery. The gift of the Earth. My calling is to honour it - to see it as the Tree of Life."