INLAND

Paintings and Drawings by Bridget Macdonald
Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum   

Saturday 27 May - Saturday 22 July

Bridget Macdonald makes a welcome return to Worcester City Art Gallery with a new collection of paintings and drawings.   Her exhibition takes on the English landscape tradition and gives it a contemporary twist.

The paintings trace a journey inland from the coastal landscape of the Isle of Wight where she was born to the Herefordshire/Worcestershire borders where she now lives.   Cattle, distant farmhouses, a glimpse of a farmyard all convey a feeling for country life but,   as Sheila McGregor notes in her catalogue essay:   "These scenes are ... mysterious staging posts in the artist's own idiosyncratic rural odyssey, their individual features subdued and suppressed by a darkening light which seems to hint at notions of nostalgia, dispossession and loss."

  Hunters, a large scale charcoal drawing, shows a group of women riders waiting by a covert - there are echoes of Stubbs in the rhythms of the composition and a classical dignity which is not often brought to the subject.   Hunting may have been banned but Macdonald's work conveys a certain respect for age-old ritual.   Other drawings take classical mythology as their source, continuing the theme of landscape as a place in which human emotions and conflicts are played out.  

Identification with rural life comes easily to her - her family farmed both on the Isle of Wight and in Gloucestershire.   At school she was advised to go to Art College but trained in dairy farming instead.   The harsh reality of working on the land soon put paid to her idealised view of it, and she finally made it to Art College over twenty years later.   Now she is able to see landscape as a kind of autobiography.   In her work she explores the way that associations are built up through individual experiences and memories, and also the accumulated knowledge of paintings and literature which have shaped our response to the countryside.

Bridget Macdonald has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Wolverhampton and Derby Art Galleries, Quay Arts Centre, Birmingham University; group exhibitions at Ikon Gallery, Midlands Arts Centre, Glyndebourne Festival Opera; and national survey exhibitions such as Cheltenham Open Drawing and the Hunting Art Prizes.   Her work is in the collections of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Worcester City Art Gallery, a number of corporate investment collections and many private collections in the UK, USA, Italy and France.

She is represented by Art First Contemporary Art Ltd of Cork Street, London.