Kelly McDonald: Artist Statement & Bio

Blurrily focussing around the edges of the ‘jewelleryness of jewellery’, this work aims for an aesthetic balance between art and craft, the wall and the body, and the gutter and high value. 

McDonald takes pleasure in the poetry of simple things, excavating meaning from otherwise discarded useful objects and softening the hardest edges of utilitarian design. Working in series, McDonald draws out the potential for new meanings in our daily encounters with objects, coaxing subtle affinities and delicate perceptions of difference from her rhythmic constellations and typologies of form. By working in this way, McDonald hopes to endow objects with a greater sense of their lived-with experience, and in particular, what they then might reveal about the lives and labours of women. 

Kelly McDonald completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts (1997). Since 2004 McDonald has been based in Wellington, New Zealand, where she was a tutor in the contemporary jewellery programme at Whitireia New Zealand (2007-2019), a selected participant in several iterations of the Handshake mentoring project (2014 – 2019) and completed her Masters of Visual Art at Massey University (2019).   

McDonald’s work has been included in Schmuck, Munich (2017), and Wunderruma, an international touring exhibition curated by Karl Fritsch and Warwick Freeman. Her recent exhibitions include The Mother Lode with Victoria McIntosh, exhibited as part of Radiant Pavilion, Melbourne, Australia (2019), solo exhibitions TOOL LOOT & The Mother Lode, at The National, Christchurch and Portraits, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland, both in 2018.