Ian McDonald

Patrick Parrish Gallery is pleased to present Pillars, Resistors, Wheelers and Dealers, a solo exhibition by Michigan-based artist Ian McDonald. The show features McDonald’s latest ceramic vessels, which pursue his continued interest in the swinging pendulum between pottery making through the lens of sculpture and sculpture construction through the framework of pottery.

Each of these directions of thought produces results that address structural objects in both discrete form and detailed parts. Hand railings, support structures, canopy shades, and ambiguous segments all work together through a process of hand-made improvisation that is mixed with moments of measurement, ultimately producing an architectural landscape of studio ceramics.

Ian Mcdonald is an artist living and working in the United States whose work stems from a constant organizing and arranging of a vocabulary of forms and materials. His architectural ceramic vessels are made in parts, measured, cut, rejected then saved, and assembled at the potter’s wheel to achieve their final form.

McDonald has shown throughout the U.S, Europe, and Japan, including The Cranbrook Art Museum, Play Mountain and the Curators Cube in Tokyo, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, The New Wight Gallery at UCLA in Los Angeles and Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York City. European venues include Nieuwe Vide Gallery in Holland, Sophienholm Exhibition Hall in Copenhagen Denmark, and the Svendborg Kunstingbygning Museum in Svendborg Denmark. In 2007 he was awarded the “Premio Faenza” from the Museo Internazionale della Ceramiche in Faenza, Italy. He has completed residencies in Holland at the European Ceramic Workcenter, the Museum of International Ceramics in Denmark, and the Museum of Fine Arts at the De Young Art Center in San Francisco. His work has appeared or been mentioned in numerous publications including Art Forum, Metropolis, Wallpaper Magazine, Ceramics Monthly, Dwell, and The New York Times. His work can be found in public collections including the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Museum of Art and Design in New York. For over 10 years he was on the Faculty at The San Francisco Art Institute in the Ceramics and Sculpture Department. He currently lives and works in Bloomfield Hills Michigan and is the Artist-in-Residence and Area Head of Ceramics at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.