• Andrew McDonald

'To be a coward' is Andrew McDonald’s second solo exhibition of new work at The International 3. It will take the form of an installation comprising of new drawings and sculpture. 

The sculpture, made from hand welded steel, springs, tension wire and blades, is described by McDonald as a 3 dimensional diagram of an emotional condition,

'a direct interpretation of being in an extreme state, at the point of release from that state but without ever being released from it. It could be many situations, the edge of emotional collapse, losing your temper or ecstasy.' The series of still life drawings, of plants and flowers, that accompany the sculpture are made using black biro and emulsion on canvas. Each canvas is thick with paint as corrections are made and marks covered creating a visceral quality to each drawing. Like the sculpture these drawings are equally emotionally charged and are both ugly and beautiful in equal measure.

Andrew McDonald is based in Manchester and has recently exhibited at Bury Art Gallery and Museum, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Gimpel Fils, London and at Millais Gallery, Southampton. Andrew McDonald also exhibited in British Art Show 6. 

Guardian Guide Preview : 5/12/09

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/05/visual-arts-previews-peter-campus

Notes On To Be a Coward by Andrew McDonald   

We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house, prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.

John Donne, On Death

1.
Stillness, at the body, is a physical status that suggests an expression of something uncomfortable and unnervingly busy inside, whilst being blankly disguised with face-value. Stressing at the edges of containment embarrassment wishes a kinship with slowing down, leaving only controlled breathlessness through fastening in what should otherwise spill. The convulsions of overwhelming bliss encourage our perceptions of the body to shrink and cause the skin to assume the status of perimeter. Locked-in like this, pleasure becomes one-sided and strains to be observable. Individualistic, flimsy joy is vulnerable to being punctured, spoilt or exhausted through passing over the brink to shared expression. Does stillness ever really commune with calmness or is it always a tension between tipping out and holding in? Packed with hidden shivers do our porous lives pivot on the knife-edge between confinement and carelessness?

2.
Birds have hollow bones and so in death their unrootedness is made souvenir in the snapping insubstantiality of their carcass. Unlike the disappearing dog; in their expiration birds have no choice but to explode or fall. And us? Oh we build ourselves a box of dignity in which any skin that’s left deflates and our worn bones, heavy with marrow and engraved with experience are, until all else softens, able to remain withdrawn from the soiling of the soil. To be buried alive means our breathlessness has been misread, our stillness consented, our constriction contained and so - bound like this to death; we spend our lives knocking at the box, scratching at the cover with the optimism of being heard and seen for who we wantonly want to be.

3.
To draw a line is an act of knowingness. An effect of consciousness made visible, it awards the prospect of infinity but is still haunted by mortality. A culpable presence, a line has no choice but to bind the two together and demands a scrutiny akin to running a finger, a look, a feather over the conjoined flesh that says a scar. A line pulls itself along by paradoxically pulling together. Whether meandering or strung out, weighted or buoyant it is incapable of escaping what stands on its other side or raise itself above what lies below for a line is always co-dependant on the differentiation it produces. A line drawn exists by dividing and binding.




4.
Notability preys on appearance. Being seen is essential to shame. Oscillating between verb, to shame and adjective, to be ashamed; shame dissolves the boundaries by which we protect ourselves. Towards the surface rages the heat of self-consciousness determined by the presence of scrutinous eyes. Desperate to avoid its trapping gaze we attempt to look away and yet remain visible, the skin blistered with the blushing colouration of embarrassment. All pervasive, the edges of ourselves become occupied in the knowingness that we are no longer what we had hoped to be understood to be. Ambushed by exposure our insides vibrate right at the periphery of the life we previously led. Shame comes from elsewhere, even from somewhere as proximate as closeness. It enforces such power that difference is able to perforate our inhibited lives. Nothing remains still. Our pallid faces are ignited like lanterns  lit to attract abusers to their prey. Spinning their entrails our eyes flicker everywhere to shun contact with the shamer. Defeated our heady consciousness hangs low, a pithy acknowledgement of our depreciation. And everyone can register the helplessness, the turmoil and the agony at the beaming success of intrusiveness having cut its entrance.

5.
Full tang blades are those made from one piece of metal but remain as the double-edged tools which Sontag states  are the master-utensil. Multifarious, a knife can itself cut at the distinctions of domestication with violent swathes. Imbued with threat it is a weapon to be tamed through normative practices. Used with skilfulness, with cautionary measure, with witnessed communality its bladedness operating within the appropriate behaviours of the circumstances that dull its threat yet sees its edge still sharp. An edge, if smothered in the safety of a hand palm demonstrates a gesture of trustworthy self – the protective handle kindly offered. But with acceptability the wrist may twist, the edge may top the spine and so the line will be drawn and an incision made.

6.
We fail by breaching the agreements of deference to conventions and then quiver from having been judged. Only by returning to being unwatched, to thinking ourselves rendered safe by obscurity regained may we unwrap in the sanctuary of being once more ignorable. Guilt differs from shame. We can be guilty without feeling guilty and equally feel guilty without being so. Whilst shame, activated by the vilification of our peers may be dispersed only through the reparation of our self-identity; guilt, guilt, guilt can remain forever concealed. Bound in a hole guilt’s fire expires through atonement. But until further notice, disapproved of is what we may be; and thus we, in being named, become maimed.

7.
Confession is not the voice of cowardice.

Jason E. Bowman, London 2009

 1. Sontag Susan, In Memory of Their Feelings, from Where the Stress Falls, Penguin Classics, London 2009.

Writing commissioned by The International 3 on the occasion of Andrew McDonald’s solo exhibition To Be a Coward -  14th November - 19th December 2009.