Jacqueline Donachie

Donachie creates socially-engaged art, often occupying public space. She explores biomedical research and ideas of communication, participation and how public spaces are designed, managed and used in her work. Books, written by Donachie, often accompany each work.[2] She has also created unique ways to visualize public problems which can then be later discussed by those in government. One example of this was in the town of Huntly where issues about who bikes and where were in debate.[3] Donachie's solution to visualizing the problem involved all bikers to attach chalk to their ride and then go about their business. The chalk would then record residents' progress in a visual manner throughout the town.[3]

Donachie was one of a group of artists who helped establish Glasgow in the 1990s as one of the world's most dynamic contemporary art communities. There has been a retrospective exploring this body of work in Glasgow, which was called Generation.[4]

Speedwork is a work at House for an Art-lover in Glasgow, which has been created after Donachie spent time with running groups using the park. Tomorrow Belongs to Me was a collaboration with Darren Monckton, a professor of human genetics at the University of Glasgow. It is a research project and film installation, which examines the personal impact of illness on individuals and families and Donachie also engaged with the scientific community whose research sought to explain how such illness arose.[5]

New Weather Coming, Donachie's work for the 2014 GENERATION festival, included three green trailer sculptures that toured Scotland and were accompanied by the handing out of a "book of Stories and Pictures" to daytrippers.[6][7] The mobile sculpture in Oban was ill-received.[8]

Donachie's exhibition Right Here Among Them, a mid-career retrospective, at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, 11 November 2017 – 11 February 2018, was funded from an award from The Freelands Foundation, which was founded by and is headed up by Elizabath Murdoch, daughter of Rupert Murdoch, media-mogul and CEO of News Corp. Other artists who have benefited from this award, through an exhibition at Gasworks in London, include Glasgow-based Jamie Crewe, who works with themes of trans-sexuality, queer identities and queer politics.