"My stone is your stone"
Palaeolithic bone engravings, rudimentary tools and ancient monoliths have been a source of inspiration for this artwork. My artefacts are fashioned in clay. This tactile process of modelling a soft, earth-sourced material, and transforming it with heat into a vitrified, permanent ceramic votive, marks the physical construction.
The impetus behind it is a mental scuffle with ideologies, cryptic symbolsand theories of human origin. From the dawn of opposable thumbs, the human species has been leaving its mark on history, every modest incision linked to a greater story. This mixed-media curation alludes to allegory. Sealed behind glass, it's a thematic representation of knowledge which is sacred and revered. Paper scrolls feature alongside the porcelain and stoneware receptacles. Poetic, hand-written snippets are rolled into the spiral that spans global symbolism and firmly sealed. These expressions are not to be revealed, but rather recorded, secured and stored. Fragments of stone and shell are retrieved from the floor of the Bann, near the ancient Mesolithic site at Mountsandel.
With a First-class Honours degree in Fine and Applied Arts, Kyla McDonagh is currently producing art works from her studio based at the North Coast. And like the cave artists of the Franco-Cantabrian triangle 40,000 years ago, she is still using iron oxide, manganese dioxide and charcoal as pigments.