Barely 24 hours after the word had got out, Siobhan McDonald was sitting at a sunny Paris café terrace last Saturday still coming to grips with having just been named the UN Climate Action Programme’s first artist of the week in its new #Art4Climate series.

“The first I knew about it was when I opened my computer and saw the news had gone viral on Twitter and Facebook,” she says. “I am thrilled, of course, but also a bit humbled – my work strives to get the message across about the evolution of nature and the cosmos.”



'My works seek to merge the poetic and the scientific' Read more

McDonald was in Paris for the March 12 close of her six-week solo exhibition, Crystalline, at the Irish Cultural Centre, curated by Helen Carey. It included oil paintings on un-primed and weathered board; sumi ink drawings; photogenic drawings of the light and atmospheric conditions of the four major epochs up to the current Anthropocene; a layered sun combining basalt, calfskin, bone an silver wire; and plant pressings from the 1825 Franklin Arctic expedition, on public display for the first time.



The exhibition has prompted a number of reviews in English-language and French media, including the Apollo art magazine and the French weekly Télérama, which said the show was “beautiful and intelligent: two adjectives rare(ly strung) together.” Apollo’s Tom Jeffreys added “McDonald commemorates the vast diversity of the environment we inhabit and explores our equally diverse responses to it. She does so deftly and with an aesthetic that is at once coherent, understated and quietly powerful”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The work Solar Skin, hanging on the gallery’s far wall, seen along a line of artworks made of carbon and charred bone entitled Crystalline. Photograph: Pierre Rateau

Although her work is driven mainly by her fascination with the corrosion, compression and expansion of materials, McDonald is resolutely a visual artist, and says the climate change theme gravitated to her rather than the other way round. “My work is about the spirit of discovery of what is still unknown to science, going beyond the edge of the universe and exploring the layers that go back to our origins.”

Her fascination with nature and materials began early. “As a young child, I was always looking under rocks, and I remember the first time I held a meteorite – it was startling to hold something that came from somewhere else in our solar system.” Although fundamentally a painter, McDonald’s works also spans installation, sculpture, and sound.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Northern Lights, oil on board. Photograph: Angelique Cheronnet

The eponymous work in the Crystalline show, an installation of dozens of squares of sponge with upturned corners coated with carbon and bone and stretching along the centre of the exhibition, touched different sensibilities. Although created to mark the launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Solar Orbiter mission in 2018, one visitor said it reminded her of a music score.



She found that less disconcerting than the music that accompanied a four-minute film, At the Edge of Visibility, and echoed the sound of dying glaciers in the Arctic Circle. “It made me feel as though I were the sole survivor on Earth, and contrasted strongly with the optimism I felt in the paintings.”



Another visitor to the work, Marilyn Smith, executive director of the Energy Action (EnAct) multimedia project, which aims to remind us that energy underpins everything we do, did not feel the same optimism. For her, the exhibition gave a sense of what CO2 emissions really mean. “It makes the invisible visible, and seems to ask whether we have reached the tipping point [of no return] in climate change.”



McDonald’s work is “provocative, complex and profoundly moving,” says Terry McMahon, an Irish film director, writer and actor. “Her interrogation of humankind’s fragile position in the universe is a daring assault on the senses that plunges the viewer into a river of history that goes right to the core of our existence. Yet, rather than these waters being dark, her show somehow reveals what a miracle our species is.”



Crystalline: art from the Arctic, space and beyond - in pictures Read more

Pace is a constant preoccupation for McDonald. “Looking back at our past gives us an understanding of time and our role in nature,” she says. “The vast diversity of the environment we inhabit has always percolated my projects, particularly the pace of human time with the slow disclosure of organic growth and change.” For her, pace is also at the core of a painting itself, for both the artist and the viewer. “There is something interesting about the act of painting in such a fast and image-saturated world. I think it has something to do with the slowing down of the process of painting, both in the making and viewing.”



McDonald is now working on a series of larger paintings. These pieces were inspired by a collection of photographs of the tragic 19th century Northwest Passage expeditions, which she found at the National Library of Oslo. “I was transfixed by the composition and shadows of a time gone by, which seemed to be erased in places,” she says. “The plates themselves seemed apocalyptic.” With this new work, she further develops her research and enquiry into the properties of materials and the relationship between humans and the natural world. “The narrative appeals to me as a metaphor for the process of painting,” she adds.

Before the end of the year, McDonald hopes Crystalline will be shown in Ireland, the UK and by the European Space Agency. New work for international art fairs with Gibbons & Nicholas, an exhibition at Paris Photo in November and a solo show at the Catherine Hammond Gallery, Ireland, are also under way.

