Devin McDonald received her BA in Fine Art with a concentration in ceramics from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and went on to study ceramics at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where she received her MFA in 2019. She is now setting up her studio in Portland, Maine with a community of other artists. McDonald’s work in the 2021 February Exhibit comprises small, sculptural, ceramic collages. The artist collects small pieces of organic matter, dipping them in liquid clay to create shells that remain after firing burns these items to ash. She arranges, assembles, binds, and fuses the resulting fossils together in a process she refers to as a form of visual poetry. This metaphor has two layers: first, that the series was inspired by a particular collection of writings by poet Alejandra Pizarnik, with each title echoing a line of poetry; second, the pieces themselves are structured like physical manifestations of poems given their immediacy, concision, and delicate beauty.
