the yellow wallpaper | kaeli macdonald

Exhibiting April 7 - 21, 2026

“I am an interdisciplinary artist, working phenomenologically, exploring themes of relationship, identity and connection. Recently, focusing on explorations in clay, incorporating both fired and unfired ceramics to create installations that invite interaction with the viewer. I use simple forms, repeated in multiple, with subtle shifts in shape, texture and colour.  Much of my work involves a juxtaposition of seemingly opposing elements, rough lumps of clay, glazed with the softest pink; ceramic wallpaper hangs heavy on the wall, resembling cookies – a nostalgic reference to the domestic – but if these are cookies, they look burnt, and too plentiful to feel quite safe or homey. Sweet little bowls, that when laid on the floor, cover the ground, making it difficult to walk; a table heaped with tiny vessels, soft, round shapes inviting, but the table is shaking, the bowls tinkling as they bump into each other, in this subtle manufactured earthquake. My work as a psychotherapist, and as a mother, informs my art practice. Through objects and images, I engage with ideas of identity, relationship, and mental health, particularly anxiety. My work often includes psychological themes, references the body, and offers sensory and tactile experiences for the viewer.

the yellow wallpaper is an installation of over 200 clay tiles of various floral shapes in yellow tones, hung to resemble wallpaper. These tiles were formed in the same process as the sugar cookies of my childhood. Both dough and clay rolled by hand, cut with stainless steel cutters of various shapes and sizes. My studio space is most often my kitchen, so clay and cookies inhabit the same space, the identities of artist-mother working in parallel, in tandem. Rooting my work quite firmly in the sphere of domesticity, I am operating both in connection with and seeking to disrupt and challenge the assumptions we continue to make about this space and those who occupy it. the yellow wallpaper is based on a short story, of the same name, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892. Gilman describes the uncanny experience of a woman recovering from an undisclosed illness, which reading it now, can easily be understood as a postpartum mental health crisis. This character’s description of her experience is disturbingly relatable to the narratives I hear every day from new mothers – her isolation, her anger, how easily her experience is misunderstood and dismissed by those around her. How much has stayed the same in 134 years?

In the yellow wallpaper, I seek to remind viewers of sweet and homey things: cookies, wallpaper, flowers. And at the same time refer to something a bit more disquieting - the cookies look slightly burnt and too plentiful to be quite right. If this is wallpaper, it’s too heavy, the pattern uneven and discoloured. Through the use of repetition in this piece, I aim to make visible the felt sense of rumination and anxiety; to make tactile the ongoing and ever-present constraints felt while tirelessly pursuing the image of perfection in motherhood, the relentless pressure to present a mask of happiness when what is being felt is something quite different. I invite the viewer into this experience with me, into a space that presents a dialectic, an image and a narrative that is never just one thing.”

Featured Work

Description: the yellow wallpaper, 2026, stoneware, various glazes

Installed size: 82”h x 132” w

Each tile approximately: 3”x 2”

About the Artist

Kaeli Macdonald is a Toronto-based*, interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BFA from OCAD University, where she completed a major in Sculpture/Installation. Often involving multiples, repetition in her work is both rumination and meditation on everyday interactions with environment, self and other. Macdonald’s work has incorporated elements of performance, video, photography, painting, and found objects. Most recently focusing on clay to explore identity, materiality and connection. Her practice is both conceptual and experiential. She has exhibited at Red Head Gallery, The Art Gallery of Mississauga, Propeller Art Gallery and Gerrard Art Space among others.  

In addition to her work as an artist, Kaeli Macdonald is a social worker/psychotherapist, and a mother/stepmother to four children. This layering of identities and roles informs her art practice, frequently addressing concerns with socially constructed narratives around woman, mother and mental health. 

*Located on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat and other Anishinaabeg peoples.