Kaeli Macdonald (Toronto, ON)
walking on eggshells/worry bowls. Stoneware, glaze, approx 150 bowls of various sizes (approx. 1 x 1 in. or less), total installation size 3 x 5ft.
Bio
Kaeli Macdonald is a Toronto-based*, interdisciplinary artist.
She holds a BFA from OCAD University, where she completed a major in Sculpture/Installation. Incorporating elements of performance, video, photography, painting, found objects and clay, her practice is conceptual, emotional, and tactile. Kaeli employs a phenomenological process, layering image, gesture and object to explore identity, materiality and connection.
Kaeli is a social worker/psychotherapist and a mother/stepmother to four children.
*Located on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat and other Anishinaabeg peoples.
Artist Statement
Often involving multiples, repetition in my work is both rumination and meditation on everyday interactions with environment, self and other.
walking on eggshells/ worry bowls was made in response to an increasing sense of dread for, and in, the world. Over the past 2 years, at a series of communal tables, I made these 212 small bowls. Laid on the floor, as ground cover, they create a precarious, uneven landscape. To traverse this field would be to contort oneself to avoid any misstep, or to risk crushing these delicate vessels under foot. You are invited to pick up one of these bowls, to worry the surface with your fingers, perhaps tracing the same path I took with my hands in the making of each sculpture. The visible cracks, bumps, and lumps in the body of each shape remind us of the tactile connection between human and object.
These bowls are meant to be held and touched. Please feel free to pick up and interact with the work.