Murdo Macdonald
2nd July 2023
Everyone, like Samuel Johnson, has an opinion on Macpherson's Ossian, but few of us ever manage to get a hand on an actual copy of the works. Fortunately, Murdo Macdonald does the bibliographic work for us, and details the doggedness of his desultory browsings and subsequent musings which led to the composition of his own versions. (is there ever anything but versions to work through here?) So, this is the big chance to find out what it was about the versions of this poetry that set Europe aflame with romantic passion and melancholy, and, as Napoleon himself put it, 'Devour Ossian!'
29th March 2023
Is 'dwelling' always an invasion of some type? In the stoical approach, which is the inescapable ethos of our contemporary of the ecological and the sustainable, it seems so, yes. Here, in appropriately ossianic mode for these end-of-times, a paratactical Murdo Macdonald muses on the hybrid in Chicago.
12th January 2023
A meditation on those places where you can learn to see things and make things, and mess around with materials and forms and colours, usually for no particular purpose other than what Murdo Macdonald calls here a 'true education'. What will come of it, what has become of it?
6th October 2020
John Latham's 'Niddrie Woman' : former shale bings, a massive piece of land art, a nature reserve, a monument to the achievements and sufferings of the people and the territory of the industrial revolution. A documentation by Murdo Macdonald.
LAOCOON AND LOSS
by
Murdo Macdonald