Annie Flora Watson Donaldson

I consider my sculptural practice as a form of ~non~sense and world making informed by principles of ecosophy and material ecology. I attend to the question of how we might live in better dynamism and more responsively with the ecosystems whose pulse is also somewhat our own. I am occupied with heterotopic playscapes, a carnivalesque aesthetic, and the tensions between escapism and revolution. 

Many of my works involve a process of spatial and temporal cartography, mapping foraged flora through the process of natural dying, and then bringing the logic of the shifting seasons into spaces reserved for acculturation of children. Natural dyeing is an ephemeral practice, like each season the dye will also inevitably fade. 

Dealing with a narrative of loss, but also of hope, I am intrigued by the notion of child who grows sideways, who does not give up on playfulness, opposes power that always presumes a hierarchy, and subverts linear progressions. I theorise of ‘wild toys’ as unruly objects that have the capacity to enchant, queer, subvert, resist monomania and domestication and unbuild the world.

Utilising low theory, as developed from Ranciere’s intellectual emancipation, I’m deeply intrigued by states of unknowing, naivety and ignorance. I present cute(sy) renderings of the world with eerie undertones, paradoxical wilding nurseries that critique binaries of domesticity and the wild through a considered, post-colonialist and feminist lens.