About Fiona MacDonald

Fiona MacDonald brings local histories and cultural traditions back to life as interrogative counter-monuments to the national story. She gleans telling details from neglected archives and personal collections, turning documents into monuments by exploiting the material eloquence of the decorative arts and crafts, including weaving, collage, wallpaper and the graphic arts. These form building-blocks for clamorous, conversational installations about our social processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Her recent projects introduce added curatorial topics to the conversation. MacDonald extends her creative reinvention of lost archives in her role of honorary curator of the Kandos Museum, in north-west NSW. Far from the professional purview and curatorial strictures of the urban gallery or State Museum, MacDonald expands the creative possibilities of the artist-curator. She reinvents the social history museum (which focusses on the town, its cement factory, workforce and residents) as a curatorial, archivally based artist’s project.