Universally respected: How much of him is I
A biographical question is embedded in Fiona MacDonald's exhibition sub-title, how much of him is I, and is contrasted with the nineteenth century aphorism Universally Respected. This is a good introduction to the artist's concern with the reversals inevitable in the meeting of the irreconcilable categories: the ethnographic and fine art. MacDonald is a home-girl to Rockhampton and, to an extent, her life has been shaped by the legend of the once powerful Rockhampton Club. The lives of the 'subjects' of her ghostly portraits were not influenced so elusively, being subject to the Club's near total economic, legal and social dominion: as master, servant or slave.
In the halcyon days of the 1880s Club members formed syndicates to raise venture capital for monopolies ranging from the mercantile 'commonplace' of foodstuffs and labour, to the Mount Morgan Syndicate, which owned the world's richest gold mine. This fin de siecle period ultimately became a crisis of Empire and of rule of property: the shearers' strike of 1891 came to an end in the Rockhampton Supreme Court. The Club's building is now decaying in the graceful tourist fashion of its British Raj antecedents. Here MacDonald's installation of sepia, and black and white interwove portraits sits eerily in the near empty spaces, strangely at rest.
The artist has reproduced private and commemorative photographs selected from the archives of the Rockhampton City Library, Rockhampton District Historical Society, Capricornia University and for folks less historically 'significant', from SI Vincent de Paul. To avoid pedagogic footnoting MacDonald's weavings grid out social relations -some factual, some fanciful – the warp being the Club member, the weft being the non-member. Weaving details are taken from innocently beautiful