Mary McDonnell’s expressive abstract paintings visualize her sensory experience of the natural world. McDonnell’s practice is at once meditative and active: her painstakingly layered washes of ink, paint, and turpentine suggest ambient noise or variegated light, while vigorous marks made with unconventional tools like bamboo, sticks, and rubber convey staccato notes and earthy physicality. For her 2009 exhibit “Touch”, she showed paintings inspired by birdsongs, the canvases poetic transcriptions of notes of varying pitch and intensity.