April 10, 2025
Written and recorded by Gallery & Curatorial Fellow Aislinn Doherty
I Wander Lonely as a Cloud is an oil painting by artist Michael MacMahon from 2024. This 24 by 48 inch painting shows the forest floor, covered in fallen leaves, with a blooming daffodil in the foreground and a sliver of sky in the top left. Overlaid on the painting are strips of red, white, and blue that, when you look closely, resemble the partially removed shape of the British flag. This motif is common throughout many of MacMahon’s pieces in this show.
Also included in this painting are minuscule representations of a toy British soldier in the top left and ants in the bottom right. This use of hidden imagery is fundamental to MacMahon’s work as it is his goal to force viewers to really engage with his works. It is his hope that viewers will take their time looking at his paintings and work to put all the pieces together like a puzzle. The inclusion of the toy soldiers and ants is a tool that is meant to keep the audience captivated in the work in order to help them continue through their journey of discovery and understanding within the gallery space. As his work deals with many serious topics, he often uses humor as a means of getting the message across to the viewer.
Growing up in Ireland has given MacMahon a first-hand perspective on the long-lasting impacts of colonization. Many of his works in this show examine the effects of New Zealand’s postcolonial history on the land and indigenous people. With this painting in particular, he discusses how the daffodil is tied to the damaging nature of colonial education systems. He argues that while getting an education is necessary, it is also important to be aware that you have no control over, and sometimes no idea about, what is actually being taught. This specifically relates to the use of language as a cultural marker and the fact that many colonizing countries use their language as a tool of forced assimilation, therefore disregarding or altogether erasing a country’s native language. In Ireland’s case, British colonial forces used the suppression of the Gaelic language as a colonial strategy to sever Irish people from their Celtic roots. MacMahon makes the comparison that being born in Ireland, he is an English speaker, but it is not his native language. He connects this back to the nature of landscape paintings by emphasizing the phrase “born into the world.” He explains that this language implies that you are immediately coming into the world, separate from it as opposed to using “born of the world.” This manufactured rhetoric shapes our artificial connection to the landscape. Though this interaction tends to be more subtextual, MacMahon and Zachary hope to use this show to make this idea more overt and force the viewers to grapple with their relationship with the natural environment.
How does this painting make you think about your own interactions with the natural world? How do the red, white, and blue stripes interact with or disrupt the environment of the painting, and how does this impact your understanding of it?