This April it is our pleasure to present 'Overburden', an exhibition of recent work by Danny McDonald — a Hamilton-based artist who grew up in Gippsland, whose experiences of the region continues to reverberate through his art.
McDonald has combined work as an artist and art educator for 40 years, following his Bachelor of Arts in Printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts, and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts, from Monash University. He has presented fourteen solo exhibitions, and participated in countless shared and group exhibitions. McDonald has been awarded government grants to undertake artist residencies in Australia, Belgium, China and Italy, and his work is represented in international art museums such as the British Museum, UK and The Royal Museum of Fine Art Antwerp, Belgium and can be found in Australian university, corporate, private, museum and regional gallery collections including the National Gallery of Australia and National Gallery of Victoria.
McDonald writes of his exhibition ‘Overburden’:
“My eighteen drawings on printed colour grounds are a re-imaging of the now demolished Victorian mining township of Yallourn and its environment. The works reopen a social and industrial domain, appropriate its records and present a contemporary view of what was, is now, and will be."
"Yallourn was once perched near the rim of its open cut mine where an eager industry had cut into a prehistoric landscape to win coal. It symbolised a State ideal of urban planning and the mine represented a geological engineering utopia. Yallourn’s community thrived until its infrastructure was confiscated and the population and culture were dissipated. Its civil territory persists as memory, and the mine continues as a productive resource, if now a grandly emptied landscape. Ironically, its assistance to the State has a tapering future. The plant and pit’s scale, odd sculptural form, separation and secure perimeter are compelling, but stir unease. It is a monumental achievement as servant to our welfare and yet an environmental pariah.
The Overburden title refers to a layering of socio-historical and geophysical debris. Archival documents are re-contextualised to speak as art, chimera-like, to generations of displaced citizens. Metaphorically, my own youth is there too with the town rubble. The distinctive model houses are skeletal apparitions associated with people I have known. The town’s street map is an indelible footprint that reimposes community memory on the present. Some of the images serve as vanitas tableaux or memento mori and diagrams function as spatial constructs. Wreaths of coal and indigenous flora are both commemorative and augury figures. Poetic forms are conceived through elemental carbon ink, charcoal and chalk media. The subject of medical science explored in my previous projects is not unlike this current work, as a primordial topographic ‘body’ is surgically opened, harvested, waste discarded and the scar healed. The open cut mine, re-filled with its own history and its terrain ameliorated through rehabilitation, re-contours the body and lays a graft of flora present in the coal.
The artworks seek to filter idealism from earthly reality, acknowledge the inevitability of change and a loss of community identity. The township of Yallourn is a pervasive ghost, even a perennial weed, but I find a curious and poignant beauty in its broad detritus. Primarily, the drawings signify an enduring and palpable ache”.
