The Deep Zoo

Her Bright Materials: The Art of Margie McDonald

steel wood boat

plug bronze fire hose

nozzle aluminum

drain fitting truck

horn copper

nectarine pits sea

urchin spines

& capacitators

There is a persistent (if hazy) idea that art must be serviceable — provide moorage for a mummy, accommodate the Holy Water, match the sofa, teach us something uplifting, serve to move merchandise. Art, like play (and art is a form of play) smacks of frivolity and not so long ago was faulted for depending on materials; in this way, painting and sculpture were debased — unlike music, which lives in the ether as the angels do. (Although in certain quarters, music gets a bad rap too, for stimulating the senses.) Thankfully, art pays no attention and continues to subvert pieties and expectations, to rile fuddy-duddies and ride a brighter air.

plastic lathe turnings

street sweeper brush

boxcar locks

stainless steel wire

& capacitators

In the early fall of 2013, Margie McDonald was invited to install a wonder-room within the pristine and light-flooded upper gallery of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Featured at the museum’s opening, the installation was titled Sea’scape and provided not only a sea escape, but an adventure in seeing. In Margie’s words,

Last winter, with a hard hat on my head, exposed to the elements, I spent time alone in the bare bones of the future gallery — still under construction. I had visions of suspended sea creatures the moment I saw the raw space and the soon-to-be Beacon windows. . I am fascinated by unusual organic life forms. Often I pick up a dictionary of northwest marine life for artistic vocabulary — visual cues and possible titles for my work. I flip through thorny plants, wet and spiny creatures, and strange insects; they are all of great interest to me. . I have been working as a full-time artist since 2006. Recycling is the basis of my work — I started with wire from the recycle bin of the rigging shop and soon realized there was a wealth of material available in those bins, scattered throughout the boatyard.

copper, aluminum

license plate corners

porcelain insulators

capacitators

Approaching the installation, one could not help but be spellbound, and many laughed out loud. Margie had made a space for dreaming on one’s feet. All kinds of things were going on, and one entered into a jovial, whimsical (and whimsically erotic) swarm of forms that evoked enchantment. Her deviant ocean zoo — bristling with fishhooks and alphabet beads, insulators and aluminum leg bands for chickens — had triumphantly colonized the gallery, and the result was downright symphonic. John Cage would have loved this adventure in seeing, as would have Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. (If limericks could be embodied by wire and suspended from the ceiling, they would look something like this.)

Things with material bodies are restless: they are playful, they attract one another, and they evolve. The marvelous resides in things because they do not stand still. And I recalled the early animations of Karl Sims, in which computer-generated creatures made of geometric solids and programmed to learn from their mistakes, are presented with obstacles they knock down, climb over, or push aside. Both artists remind us the imagination is all about subverting limits.

“Play,” Margie says, “is all that I do.” We are in her studio — a sanctuary in sumptuous and harmonious disorder devoted to the noble games she plays with such spunk and hilarity. “When I’ve got my materials, I just want to see what that one little thing is gonna jump off to.”

Looking up into a snarl of red wire, I know we all burn more brightly beneath her stars.