David and Goliath

The romantic assurance of nature as a divine and cosmic binary to humanism often falls far short of contemporary reality, and MacDowell works to illuminate this divide between truth and beauty in her ceramics. ‘David & Goliath’ is, like all of MacDowell’s work, carefully hand-built — the cross-sectional representation of hand and animal-head remarkable for the detail conveyed in simple, bloodless white clay. A stance suggests victory, the death and decapitation of the animal an act of trophying that is mirrored and reframed again in the overall form, and the arm that represents humanity becomes as anonymous and violently detached as the act of the killing itself.