Collage

Perception, Natural Systems and the Unstable Real

My work considers how perception, memory, technology and natural processes alter what we understand as real. Across digital collage, painting, moving image, projection and public art, I construct environments in which beauty and unease coexist, and where damaged, discarded or ordinary matter becomes a site of transformation.

Collage is central to my practice, moving between digital construction, found imagery and physical assemblage. Across these works, fragments are displaced, recombined and given new relationships, allowing familiar images and objects to become strange, unstable or newly possible.

TRANSOCEANIC, 2026 - ongoing

Transoceanic is an ongoing series of collages bringing together contemporary photographs, historical imagery, natural-history sources and found visual material. The works consider the ocean as both physical environment and cultural construction — a place shaped by movement, memory, extraction, ritual and observation. Once objects enter the sea, they are carried, weathered, fragmented, inhabited, lost, recovered and reclassified, taking on meanings and functions very different from those they held on land. Transoceanic uses collage to explore that transformation, allowing images, objects and histories to undergo similar changes through displacement and recombination.

Wake is a digital collage by Kate MacDonald of the bow of a boat at sea covered with flowers, candles, fabric and scattered objects, with deep blue water stretching to the horizon.

Wake, 2026

Whaling Party is a digital collage by Kate MacDonald combining a historic whaling engraving, a photographic whale, a natural-history image of a sea urchin and white hand-drawn marks across an aged paper background.

Whaling Party, 2026

Fragments of a weathered orange-and-white street sign reading “DO NOT BLOCK” suspended over deep blue water churned by a boat wake.

DO NOT BLOCK displayed on a large digital billboard above Times Square in New York, surrounded by illuminated signs and city buildings.

DO NOT BLOCK, 2026

Digital collage

Presented on the BEAST digital billboard in Times Square, New York, during NFT.NYC.

Buoy, 2026

Digital collage

SHELL ASSEMBLAGES

These small assemblages move collage from the flat image into found marine objects. The shells become material, container and pictorial space, with fragments of the human body and manufactured objects embedded within their naturally iridescent interiors.

Iridescent abalone shell containing a collage of a raised human arm, a partially submerged face, metallic strips, chain and found objects arranged within the shell’s pearlescent interior.

Shower, 2026

Collage in abalone shell, found imagery and mixed media, 4 x 5 x 1.5"

Iridescent abalone shell containing a reclining fragmented human figure, dark circular forms and a small pearl arranged within the shell’s pearlescent interior.

Grotto, 2026

Collage in abalone shell, found imagery and mixed media, 4 x 5 x 1.5"

DEBRIS 2017-2026

Debris brings together fragments of natural and human-made environments, removing them from their original contexts and allowing new relationships to emerge. The series established an ongoing interest in discarded matter, transformation and the instability of familiar forms. (Select collages from series.)

Debris #1, 2017

Nest, 2024

Flight is a Rare Gift, 2026

Birth. Transference. Waste. Something in the corner of the shed that I have been meaning to look at. Questions of origin and of order. Priorities. Destruction of myths. Celebrations without champagne or fanfare. The mix of greenery instead of thoughts. The parts of nature where bodies twine.

Awards

Ten Artists to Watch - Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA)
Los Angeles, CA 2017
Debris #1

Chernobyl Spring 1986