Making Love to a Mountain Forest

MacFarlane’s affection for the landscape surrounding her is echoed in these layered and collaged birchbark compositions. A lexicon of forms emerges from a practice of observing, collecting, and shaping this natural material. The resulting designs reveal the sacred and celebratory ways that MacFarlane includes herself in what we call ‘landscape’, re-inhabiting her own experiences. The cellular, wing-like, leafy, and feathery elements in this work meet, merge, and evolve like their counterparts in the natural world, like light changing from season to season, or birds mating, nesting, and migrating. The multifarious, mutable relationships between the artist and the creatures and places that inspire her are made visible, defined, and strengthened with delicate sutures, a connective tissue of thread and stitch.

These rich, kaleidoscopic patterns evoke the process of mitosis or cell division, hatching larvae, winged insects, and hybridity. To divide, a cell replicates its many parts, doubling and then splitting into two identical ‘daughter’ cells. These fundamental impulses, to grow and to divide, underpin works that simultaneously examine life up close, while stepping away to deeply consider the experiences of a separate self. Luminous and symmetrical, when displayed together in a grid, the pieces become textile-like, resembling an opulent and carefully crafted quilt. The imagery draws the viewer into these intimate processes of growth and division which have been skillfully transformed into a living pattern of infinite complexity.