Susan McDonald
The Body, Time and Politics of Desire
Susan McDonald’s work intertwines mythology, personal history and intimate confession.
Sacred and raw, divine and earthly; her art embraces these tensions and plays with the contrasts.
Venus and Adonis
The Venus and Adonis series plays with the tension between passion and vulnerability, love and loss. Desire does not fade with time but instead takes on new forms, shaped by memory, resilience, and the weight of experience.
Venus and Adonis I, 2025
Oil stick, plaster, acrylic on board (framed)
79 x 59 cm
Thresholds
The Thresholds series acts as a meditation on what it means to be between worlds, where one state dissolves into another.
Light meets darkness
Beginning meets end
Thresholds of inner and outer worlds blur
Thresholds III, 2026
Acrylic on canvas, 35.8 × 28 cm
Thresholds V, 2026
Acrylic and twine on canvas, 35.8 × 28 cm
Thresholds II, 2026
Acrylic on canvas, 35.8 × 28 cm
Persephone
The Persephone series reimagines the ancient life/death/life myth as story of transformation, resilience and renewal. These works, incorporating symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast, reflect the cycles of becoming that flourish through periods of uncertainty, rupture and return.
The paintings hold a hopeful balance between darkness and bloom, vulnerability and strength, symbiosis and independence. They suggest that reinvention is not the abandonment of self, but the growth of knowledge, desire and freedom.
Persephone VIII, 2026 Acrylic, collage and pin on canvas (framed), 55 x 45 cm
Persephone X, 2026 Acrylic, dried cultures on canvas (framed), 39 x 29 cm
Persephone VII, 2026 Acrylic, dried cultures and pin on canvas (framed), 104 x 84.5 cm
Dirty Goddess
These pieces, with their dusty, rubbed surfaces, suggest the residue of touch and time, the remnants of lives lived and loves lost. They echo the themes of her mythological series, reminding us that desire, in all its forms, leaves traces - on our bodies, in our memories, and on the world around us.
Rather than simply reflecting on desire, Dirty Goddess celebrates its persistence, even in the face of societal erasure. By drawing from deeply personal experiences and universal myths, McDonald reclaims the narrative of aging, presenting a vision of womanhood that is unapologetically complex, sensual, and alive.
Dirty Goddess III
Acrylic on canvas, 210 x 178 cm
Dirty Goddess VII
Acrylic on canvas, cotton, 208 x 173 cm
Dirty Goddess V
Acrylic on canvas, canvas collage, 230 x 178 cm
Eve
The narratives we tell about women shape the way we view ourselves, our potential and our place in the world.
How would our culture be different if the first woman had not been branded as ‘second born, first to sin’?
Tell a different story.
Mother’s Skirt
Mother’s Skirt XII
Acrylic on cotton, linen, canvas collage
51 x 43.5 cm
These paintings incorporate fragments of her mother’s skirt, a gesture that transforms them into vessels of personal and generational history. Here the body is presented as absence, as memory, as something inherited. McDonald’s mother was distant, her relationship to love and sexuality marked by silence. That silence lingers in these works, where the traces of fabric become more than just material; they are symbols of what was unspoken and what was withheld. By juxtaposing the maternal with the carnal, McDonald creates a dialogue between generations, confronting the legacies of repression that have shaped her understanding of intimacy.
