Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects.
[8] Donovan returned to her studies and earned her MFA at VCUarts, part of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in 1999, when she also received her first interview in Articulate Contemporary Art Review.
[9] Soon after, she relocated to New York and was invited to participate in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she presented a floor installation (Ripple, 1998) made of cut electrical cable.
"[12] In a review of that exhibition, art critic Jessica Dawson observed that "Like Whorl, the artist's past works transformed outsize quantities of everyday materials—toothpicks, roofing felt, rolls of adding machine paper—into the unexpected: natural formations, seemingly living organisms, topographic maps".
Transplanted (2001) expanded upon her previous projects with torn pieces of tar paper in order to create a monumental slab of material occupying a footprint of over 25-feet square.
Moiré (1999) consists of large spools of adding machine paper that are manipulated and layered to form radiating patterns that shift with the position of the viewer.
"[24] Fellow artist Chuck Close told a reporter that "At this particular moment in the art world, invention and personal vision have been demoted in favor of appropriation, of raiding the cultural icebox.
She produced a site-responsive installation using loops of Mylar tape affixed in clusters to all of the walls of a gallery, which surrounded the viewers in a shifting, phenomenological experience as they moved through the space.
Donovan also introduced museum audiences to newer projects such as Untitled (Mylar), which consists of folded sheets of Mylar condensed into spherical units, and Untitled, a wall-based installation that uses sheets of folded and compressed polyester film to construct a thick screen of material that plays with light, optics and perspective (a subsequent iteration of this project was commissioned for the Lever House Art Collection[60]).
[68][69] The 2018 exhibition Hyperobjects at Ballroom Marfa—curated in collaboration with Timothy Morton—considered Donovan's work within a broad conceptual framework of geological time and the imprint of human activity and its material residue on the present and future.
Curator Nora Abrams combined Donovan's older and more recent two-dimensional and three-dimensional works in order to “open up new areas of dialogue within her practice and enable viewers to make connections across time and subject matter”.
[72] Including sculpture, drawings, works on paper, and site-responsive installations, the exhibition called attention to how Donovan's material experimentations result in a varied practice.