Dirty Goddess
No.9 Cork Street, London
April 2025
Dirty Goddess reflects a powerful duality - an embrace of both the sacred and the raw, the divine and the earthly.
Solo exhibition with 58 works on canvas, board and paper.
Susan McDonald’s exhibition, Dirty Goddess, intertwines mythology, personal history, and intimate confession, creating a body of work that is both timeless and deeply personal. The title reflects a powerful duality - an embrace of both the sacred and the raw, the divine and the earthly. McDonald’s work reclaims the image of the goddess, as a fully embodied woman, shaped by her history and desires.
The Body, Time, and the Politics of Desire
Her abstract paintings take inspiration from biblical and classical sources, as seen in their titular references to Eve, Venus and Adonis. Yet these mythological anchors serve as starting points rather than fixed narratives. McDonald reinterprets these archetypes through a deeply personal lens, exploring what it means to be a mature woman who experiences and expresses desire. In doing so, her work counters societal narratives that render women ‘past their prime’ invisible, particularly in discussions of love, intimacy, and sexuality.
Central to Dirty Goddess is the body understood as a site of lived experience. In her, Eve series, McDonald reinterprets the biblical figure as a woman embodying agency and longing, moving beyond traditional explanations of sin and transgression. Similarly, her Venus and Adonis series explores the tension between passion and vulnerability, love and loss. The works unapologetically assert that desire does not fade with time but instead takes on new forms, shaped by memory, resilience, and the weight of experience.
