Kate MacDonald's work explores recurring themes of redemption, grace, and metamorphosis. Her paintings and digital collages capture surreal scenes, transcending ordinary experience and evolving into magical worlds of the everyday. In Kate’s gardens and debris, beauty coexists alongside dread, an uneasy alliance that charges her work with a humble and sometimes uncomfortable grace. Underlining all of it is the idea of redemption. Will beauty redeem us? Nature? Technology?

She began her series Chernobyl Spring 1986 in 2011 after reading about how nature was reclaiming the Chernobyl nuclear site. Catfish (unfished) growing to sizes not seen in years, the wild horses, the wolves - the birch in their soil still emitting radiation. The pavement is still safer than the forest, and yet -. For all of this hope, there was still the omnipresent fear of what had been and what was still possible. And on a smaller, more imaginable human scale the deaths, the diaspora, the mutations, the mundaneness of the work. Described as “haunting” and “visually captivating”, Kate entwines the real and imagined, remembered and reinterpreted, to integrate a shared world tragedy into her own personal narrative.

"As a teenager, I followed the news in half-terror, half-fascination. It seemed impossible to reconcile the gravity of what was unfolding against the personal tribulations of my own life."