October 23, 2024

Musings of Place

Daniella Mooney & Mary MacGill

Interview by Sylvia Estes. 
Photography by Em McCann Zauder. 

The work of both Mooney and MacGill embody a sense of place. Characterized by color, texture and geology, each piece reflects time spent in nature.

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SE: Daniella, can you tell us about your painting process?

DM: I paint with oil on board. I prefer board for its hard, smooth, non-textured surface and the way stiff bristled brushes leave scrappy marks on the surface. The dimensions I like are rarely bigger than a large chessboard which makes the gestures I use both tight and loose. At times I paint quite quickly and try not to overthink the marks, like trying to catch a scent on the wind. This is all to say I don’t have set schedules or times for painting but rather find myself in seasonal painting cycles in my studio. I tried painting en plein air for a bit but found the logistics a little cumbersome and instead developed a way toinfuse more memory and feeling into the process from afar.


SE: Mary, you studied painting in college, how has this experience influenced your jewelry making process?

MM: I started drawing and painting with my mom very early on. We’d go to nature preserves after school or in the summer, bringing our dogs and a box of watercolors. These are some of my favorite memories. In college, my senior thesis project centered around memory and retrieving those moments, crafting them in soft blurry lines and remembering through color. With my jewelry, I’ve maintained a very similar process. Instead of a brush and watercolors, I choose stones that fit the translucency, color, and weight of a landscape – sometimes working directly from photos, and others by closing my eyes or listening to music that transports me to a place.

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SE: Daniella, how do you choose a location to paint?

DM: I usually paint from photographs and memories of places I've been. I lived for a while in the Western Cape in South Africa and for a good chunk of time spent most weekends in the mountains. These early trips really forged in me a sensitivity to the quality of feeling I experienced in those remote and eerie spaces. From then on and now living in Europe, I travel to mountains and use this material to paint from. The locations aren’t always so specific, but tie into larger travel plans and adventures I might find myself in. For some reason I seem to be drawn to the more exposed rock surfaces and features (those Dolomites!), something about the character and light that appeals to my sense of geologic drama.


SE: Is there a place you’ve painted that feels particularly important? If so, where/why?

DM: I guess all the places have different qualities of importance. I'd say paintings of mountains in South Africa are closest to my heart, it's where I spent a lot of time with close friends, and had many formative personal experiences. The Cederberg, Agtertafelberg, Winterhoek, Matroosberg, and of course Table Mountain are all steeped in a mix of interpersonal relationship dynamics and at the same time hints of loneliness too. Another important trip was to Namibia with my good friend Anna in 2018, where I spent lots of mountain-friend-time in some of the most alien landscapes I've ever been in. Another important aspect of being able to travel to the mountains and have the unfettered freedom to be in them comes with the awareness of access, and how my position as a white South African has afforded me opportunities to be able to be in these spaces with ease. I think a lot about the historical sediments of the places I go, the mute geology and silent witnessing that is so present for me in landscapes, of stories not given voice and credibility but still very much there.

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SE: Mary, how does place influence your process?

MM: I feel most at home, most myself, and most alive when I’m in the woods, moving through fields, or on the beach – so these places impact my inspiration, motivation, and energy. I run or walk nature trails with my dogs almost every day and get to access an immense sense of gratitude. At every turn in every season, I take mental notes of the changes – new bursts of color, deepening hues of the ocean, full silhouettes, and rhythm of negative space. These are the snapshots I come back to when working with stones.


SE: How have Block Island and the Hudson Valley influenced your work? In what ways are these influences different?

MM: On Block Island, the energy is so bright and the inspiration is so immediate. Things are in constant motion, the ocean ever-present and then there’s the punctuation of moments with the landscape. I found my original color palette on Block Island I guess because of my connection to the ocean – shades of watery blues, mossy aquamarines, deep green tourmalines and organic pearls. The stones on the beaches have also become a resource. Smooth, hewn, and perfect just as they are. When I return to the Hudson Valley, there’s more turning to my community, and also inward (since I’m there during the colder months). This is when I find more inspiration thumbing through art books, visiting galleries, and revisiting my painting and drawing practice. I get to spend time playing, figuring out how to incorporate different colors in unexpected ways.

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SE: Daniella, we’ve also admired your sculptural work, how does your sense of sculpture influence your painting?

DM: I'd say that my painting developed as a bit of a practical and necessary offshoot to my sculptural practice. Sculpture seems to be a bit more ‘agony and ecstasy’ compared to the quick free-flowing painting process, and so I found that I had a more immediately satisfying way of world-building in painting. In my painting practice I find a quieter more personal form of expression to the ‘harder’ questions I try to answer through sculpture. My painting is like the soft and welcoming underbelly to the exposed surfaces that brace themselves against the elements. Sounds a little dramatic, but basically both creative realms involve stone, the one just feels a bit more vulnerable and dreamy.

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Conversations in Stone, Granite, Sandstone, 88 x 60 x 220cm, 2018 (Left)
Purple Hearts, Purple Heart, Found Rock, 13 x 12 x 12cm, 2011 (Right)

Conversations in Stone, Granite, Sandstone, 88 x 60 x 220cm, 2018 (Above)
Purple Hearts, Purple Heart, Found Rock, 13 x 12 x 12cm, 2011 (Below)

SE: How does your creative process fit into your daily life?

DM: My creative process is mostly seamless with my daily life, except when I have to deal with German bureaucracy, I find my wellspring of inspiration dwindles pretty quickly then. That said, I do think that creativity somehow thrives on friction and so being able to innovatively adapt has become part of my creative game too. My life is so varied and dynamic, which is kind of by design, and so I feel I'm constantly looking for ways to challenge my preconceived ideas about the world around me. In my paintings I think this might come through with how I enjoy playing with color and form and sometimes like pushing things to the edge of abstraction.

MM: Since I’ve built a business out of my practice, it’s highly integrated. At this point, I’m actually trying to find ways to break out of my day-to-day creative process and find time to try new things, or take on more risky projects. This requires a fair amount of alone time, or “nothing time”, time to let my brain rest, so I’m looking forward to the winter when I might be able to travel and reset, get out of the daily creative process and into a more relaxed notion of that.

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SE: Daniella, we see your attention to stone/geology in both your paintings and your sculptures, what has attracted you to this material?

DM: Would it sound weird if I said I feel it in my bones? It’s a hard question to answer straightforwardly, or at least not without sounding too much like a Druid, but on the surface I guess it’s a material I've always just had an affinity for. From a young age I've always kept stones close; collections of them, climbed them, shaped them. On a deeply embodied level I love feeling the resistance of working with stone, and in that choreography of give and take, two histories are negotiating with each other, my own accumulation of time and experience and that of the stone’s. It’s a wild thing to think about, where geologic time meets human time, but a fun world to play in.


SE: Mary, can you tell us a little bit about what attracted you to working with stones?

MM: I’ve always been enamored by them! First discovering beach stones on Block Island and collecting them by the dozens, for color, for lines, for textures and shapes. Later I was introduced to gemstones and beads through my mentor Kazuko Oshima. I found that There’s something so other worldly about them – their color and ability to filter and refract light. And the most mysterious thing is that they are innately earth objects – it’s still wild to me.

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Landscapes

This Fall, Mary MacGill Studio is pleased to present an exhibition of Daniella Mooney’s oil paintings alongside limited edition jewelry designs, inspired by Mooney’s compositions.

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