Rachel McDonnell

For McDonnell, painting is a means of drawing attention to the climate emergency that we are currently living through. It is a call to action, for collaboration. As a society, we must work together and engage with our surroundings. How do we bring about positive change, and how is art part of this task? Without providing answers, McDonnell highlights art’s ability to cast new light on the familiar, to see the natural environment in new ways, and perhaps even to bring about real-world change

Writing about theatre in the 1930s, German playwright Bertolt Brecht proposed what he called the verfremdungseffekt. It is a word without direct translation, but in English is often referred to as the ‘alienation’ or ‘distancing effect’. For Brecht, it was essential to put distance between the actors on stage and the audience, rather than parroting back the speech and mannerisms of daily life in a stage setting, the audience were to realise that they were viewing a representation of life, of politics. Looking at Rachel McDonnell’s paintings, it feels that something similar is true. At times, the paintings toy with notions of photorealism, but they never commit. As viewers, we are aware of the materiality of the paint, of painting’s capacity to analyse and question the world around us.