Jade Donaldson
interdiscilpinary
ART INFUSED WITH NATURE, EXPLORING PERSONAL AND UNIVERSAL NARRATIVES.
Jade Donaldson
Since graduating from the Brown-RISD Dual Degree Program in 2016, Jade Donaldson has been cultivating her art practice in tandem with work as a fine landscape gardener. Her artistic approach incorporates a wide range of media, including painting, photography, collage, paper sculpture and video. Over the last six years, she has focused intensively on the medium of cyanotype. Using the basic engines of nature — sunlight (UV) and water — cyanotype is a process for recording the impression of physical materials placed upon a surface sensitized to light with iron salts, resulting in a negative image in Prussian blue. Using natural materials, she explores the interplay of the gesture and movement of plants with the gesture of the hand via brushstrokes. At times enacting the process multiple times upon the same surface, she investigates layers of space, history and deterioration. Mounting cyanotypes to panel and painting the surface with encaustic wax introduces additional layers, processes of addition and subtraction, and a tension between the protection of underlying layers and the obfuscation of them. Now incorporating the use of photographic negatives as well as hand-drawn elements, she begins to explore personal narrative. Inspiration visits during long walks in the woods, along the shoreline and as she works with hands in soil in her daily vocational work in gardens of Little Compton, RI, and Westport, MA. She remains interested in the ways our physical and psychical mechanics are imbued with the laws and forces of nature and continues to seek ways of representing these ideas visually.
jade.donaldson@gmail.com
508-404-3291
615 Adamsville Road
Westport, MA 02790
Coccoons I, 15" x 10", cyanotype and encaustic on panel
Descent, 15.5" x 24", toned cyanotype and encaustic on panel
Coccoons II, 13.5 x 10", cyanotype and encaustic on panel
Dormancy, 10" x 15", toned cyanotype and encaustic on panel
July, 18" x 24", cyanotype on paper