bætha is a Beothuk word meaning: go home . As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid warnings of border closings and restrictions on movement, MacDonald left his residency early. He returned to Canada leaving behind fragments of artworks. MacDonald uses this unprecedented (unanticipated) situation to assemble a body of work that considers notions of repatriation. The term is important, particularly among Indigenous people in North America, in being connected to demands for the return of ancestral cultural remains from museums and cultural institutions across the world, with the aim that they be given back to their communities.
It is through the inaccessibility of his work in not being physically present to preside over his exhibition, that MacDonald uses this opportunity to re-examine historical and contemporary challenges of Indigenous activism and agency that confront inherited colonial privilege.