The Mundane Egg
The Mundane Egg
1992
Bronze, edition of 6
Cast by Ken Cook
Signed McDonald
54 × 37 × 37 cm
The Mundane Egg developed from an image in the decorative border surrounding Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise frescoes in Florence. The form was transformed in the artist’s imagination into an egg about to hatch: an object carrying the possibility of new life.
Made during a period when themes of loss, birth and renewal were central to Stephanie McDonald’s sculpture, the work turns a symbolic image into a physical object. The egg sits above a vessel-like bronze form, its apparent fragility held against the weight and permanence of the bronze.
The coloured patination is integral to the sculpture. Rather than treating bronze as a uniformly dark material, McDonald used colour as part of the modelling of the work, an approach characteristic of her sculpture of this period.
Writing about The Mundane Egg in 1994, composer David Matthews connected the work directly with the artist’s search for a symbolic language through which ideas of death and rebirth could be given material form.
Catalogue reference
David Matthews, essay on the sculpture of Stephanie McDonald, 1994.
Edition record
Edition I — recorded
Edition VI — recorded
Editions II–V — current locations to be established
Exhibition history
1994
Stephanie McDonald, Coventry Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
Catalogue essay by composer David Matthews.
Orion Sculpture Park, Yass, New South Wales, Australia
Displayed as part of the permanent sculpture collection and during public open days. The Mundane Egg is specifically listed among the bronzes at Orion.
Publications and catalogues
1994
David Matthews, catalogue essay accompanying Stephanie McDonald’s exhibition at Coventry Gallery, Sydney. The Mundane Egg is discussed in relation to death, rebirth and the transformation of an image derived from Masaccio into the sculptural form of an egg.
Vogue Living
The Mundane Egg photographed in Stephanie McDonald’s studio in Glebe, Sydney, for a Vogue Australia feature. Issue/date, article title and photographer to be confirmed.