Seeking Home and Place: The Art of Martine MacDonald

By F. Josephine Arrowood

Sun contributor

Martine MacDonald is an award-winning artist in paint, printmaking, drawing, and mixed media, and teaches at Wayne Community College. The Detroit native lives in Allen Park and is a frequent visitor to Leelanau, where she reconnects with family, friends, and artistic inspiration. Her art is in many private and public collections. She is a past artist-in-residence at the Glen Arbor Arts Center, and her painting Leelanau: Michigan Skyscapewas included in the 2013 book The Art of The Sleeping Bear Dunes, published by Leelanau Press.Two of her sculpture assemblages from her Nest series appear in the Glen Arbor Arts Center’s juried show “New Views: Home/Place,” which runs through August 8.

Glen Arbor Sun: Your work explores themes of place, home, identity, and belonging, amid the ephemera of memory and loss. Yet your pieces also provide very beautiful images from everyday objects that act as portals and connections for others to explore. On your website, you write of ‘refining life experiences into a visual essence.’ Talk a bit about your journey as an artist, and how place has shaped you. 

Martine MacDonald: I graduated with my art degree from Wayne State in 1999. It’s only taken me twenty years to understand all this stuff! 

Sun: But before WSU, you worked as a glassblower at Greenfield Village in Dearborn for seven years; you did calligraphy; you always seemed to be drawing, papermaking, and relentlessly creating!

MacDonald: When I talk to my students, they often have this idea that they can’t approach their work until they feel inspired by the Muse; they’ll say, ‘I just couldn’t work on this because I didn’t feel inspired.’ I have to give this talk every semester where I tell them, ‘You know, it’s really all about slogging along. You may not want to do it, but you get a little running start, and pretty soon, you’ve got something done.’ Really, artists –don’t wait, because you’d be waiting a long time.

Sun: The dirty little secret is, while you’re slogging along is when the Muse shows up—

MacDonald: That’s right; you have a breakthrough or understanding. That’s a hard lesson for many to understand.

Sun: How did you figure that out?

MacDonald: When my kids were really young, I’d set up my little table, and I’d do the half-hour whenever I could. If I had free time, it wasn’t because the Muse was knocking on the door, it was that the kids were occupied, so I just had to get onto it; it was time that was available to me. I just got into the habit of going to do the work, and getting it done a little at a time. 

I’m kind of a workaholic. I find beauty in work. I’m happy in [my creative] work, and I think it has really helped with my emotional state, too. I stay on a better keel and have less depression. It makes me sleep better, too.

Sun: What about this show attracted you and led you to enter it?

MacDonald: You know, the theme of home and what it means; because of having a disruptive childhood (as so many people do), and always wanting to seek a sense of home and place. I see those nests as being a part of that. My work also has to do with a sense of time, and the nest represents time. It could be the nest where the egg is laid; it could be the empty nest; the nest of great activity when you have children and all that [domestic life] is focused there. A home itself is also like that, going through different stages. Now, as grandparents, we have our home being very quiet at times, but also being very active! 

Sun: I was struck by the piece in the Home/Place show—Upward Bound (Nest 7)—where the nest is on legs or stilts, it’s not exactly grounded in nature—

MacDonald: It starts out organic, where the legs are shaped like branches, but then it becomes more constructed. And then you have the shape of a house, and inside that shape of a house, you have a nest, which is itself a house. I’m playing with the idea of our wants versus our needs. When you have something that’s perfect already, like a nest is perfect for a bird and nothing else would be better for that bird—what do we humans have in our life that can represent that? Why do we always feel like something has to be bigger or better? I applied gold on it—well, a nest doesn’t need gold, it doesn’t need a kind of house structure to be perfect. We have the perfect already, but we want to set that aside for what we think might be better or shinier. The nest [in the art piece] comes out of something non-fertile; an organic shape, but of stone, which wouldn’t be supportive of anything life-giving.

My three-dimensional pieces—I often say those are my poems, while my paintings are like my prose. As I go forward in my paintings, they’re getting more thought, too. 

I just spent a couple of hours on my current painting, a very big piece. What’s really weird is, this painting is dictating to me—I’m so centered, so focused while I work on it. Maybe it’s about the children in this piece. I was just crying today while reading about the children in these detention centers, and then I go work on this painting which is about children, called Requiem for the Lost Children. It’s telling me what it wants, and I just very calmly show up and do the work; ‘Okay, I’d better put on my slogging boots, this is what it wants!’ I just keep showing up.

Sometimes I’ll do a painting to push some paint around. I’ll do a sky, or a river, just for the pleasure of playing with paint. It’s not asking me to go deep all the time. I don’t impose my will on the work; it’s dictating what it wants. The different media of sculpture, paint, print, a drawing—those are all languages in which to say something. I can state something in one language that wouldn’t necessarily work in another. My Self-Portrait with Flag [check out MartineMacdonald.com] could not have been a sculpture, for example. The nest sculptures are best served by being dimensional—that’s the poetry that wanted to happen.

In my three-dimensional pieces, I always like to incorporate something from the natural world: a bone or antlers, a seed, the wing of a bird. Then I like to play with the idea that it’s not a real nest you’re seeing; the one thing in the piece that’s not from nature, but handmade by me, the artist. What’s being constructed by hand, what’s found in nature?

Here’s something really cool: the robin’s nest is made to last a season—that’s it. At a certain point in the summer, it’s falling apart, as if the nest is telling the bird, ‘Time to go.’ Nature has made this bird, and all birds, so clever in how they construct their homes. Some birds come back every year to the same nest, and it’s there for them.

Sun: Crows are a recurring theme in your work as well.

MacDonald: I think a lot of artists identify with crows because they’re so graphic in the environment. They come with so much mythology, so much story already; and they’re smart. People either really love crows, or they don’t like crows, and the reason is the same: because they’re so much like humans. I wish my secret power was flying. I don’t want to be invisible; that happens to women anyway. The bird’s-eye view, soaring. One of my favorite (anonymous) quotes is ‘She flies with her own wings.’

Sun: What do you want to say about your second piece in the “Home/Place” show? You call it In the Cradle of the Deep (Nest 6), after a poem by Emma Hart Willard.

MacDonald: A friend’s late ex-husband had been a hunter, and she and her son were bothered by a box of his deer antlers. She gave them to me with the idea to make them into something more life-affirming, rather than trophies of death. I played around with them, arranging them, and thought that they could be like hands, cradling and holding the nest I created.

Sun: You were chosen as an artist-in-residence at the GAAC almost a decade ago. What was that experience like, and how did it influence you?

MacDonald: I try to encourage people to get a residency at least once, because it’s that time of concentrated effort. [In a residency] that’s your job. You get up in the morning, you’re not there to do laundry or return phone calls—you have to motivate yourself; no one is there to tell you what to do. I was there in early spring, a transition time. It was May, it was cold, but things were changing, so that you could see through the trees, the edges of the hills with that mauve color, and the bark was not brown, but gray. I was working on landscapes and skies, so immersed in the environment. Toward the end of my stay, it got really misty and gray, and I could feel the thinning between one world and the next; the ‘other’ of this place. 

When it came time to leave at the end of it, I started to cry, thinking, I’m not ready, I just started to touch on something. So I feel tender toward Glen Arbor; it has a very dear spot in my artistic development. Also, I was able to connect again with family who live in Leelanau. And of course, having the connection with the Arts Center, with the people who gave me that opportunity—a connection I still have today. It was soul-changing, like going on a spiritual retreat. It’s the time we don’t often give ourselves. I have a studio at home, but it’s different when I go home to have dinner with my husband, or go pick up the grandkids.

Sun: What do you think about young people and art? You were recently in a show at Color|Ink Studio in Hazel Park, called “Generation Two: Both Ends of the Rainbow” that used children’s art as inspiration for adult artists.

MacDonald: Young people have returned to the handcrafted movement, discovering the value in making something with their hands. They have so much to say! I tell my new students, ‘You start as painters, learning techniques and craft,’ but then I tell returning students, ‘Your goal is to move from being a painter to being an artist.’ Twenty years after earning my art degree, I’m still learning. As an artist, I have some things I want to say; I’ve got to do some more paintings!

For more information, visit MartineMacdonald.com, or visit Martine MacDonald, Artist on Facebook.