Children in Pliofilm, 1939

In this work, several children are gathered on a sidewalk in front of a woman in a large black hat, their bodies partially obscured by their transparent Pliofilm raincoats. The focus of the painting, however, is Jane, shown floating dreamlike above this urban scene. Jane is also wearing a Pliofilm rain jacket, which winds around her twisted legs while the hood bisects her face, making one half a sickly green. This bold chromatic division recalls the painting The Green Stripe, 1905, by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), though here MacLeod adapts the device to explore the disquieting effects of new synthetic materials on the fragile body of a child. The billowing coats and strange transparency lend the composition a surreal, futuristic quality, at once playful and unsettling.

MacLeod confessed just how much labour went into the work when she wrote to National Gallery director H.O. McCurry: “I’ve sweated blood over a picture which succeeds in looking over light-hearted.... The picture is called Children in Pliofilm and I do hope you will like it. It is my baby in a Pliofilm rain cape flying over the street full of similarly coated kids.”

Although she’d originally planned it as a larger canvas, MacLeod reworked it into a smaller version for submission to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The painting seems to have echoed the fair’s futuristic themes, which imagined a “World of Tomorrow” shaped by scientific innovation, advanced materials, and new modes of transportation and communication. Its suggestion of flight, combined with the use of the newly developed plastic Pliofilm, aligned with the fair’s futuristic ethos and celebration of technological progress. As both an intimate portrait of Jane and an allegory of modern childhood, Children in Pliofilm stands out within Canadian modernism. It fuses the domestic with the technological, the playful with the uncanny, revealing MacLeod’s originality in transforming private experience into a meditation on the promises and perils of the modern age.