Anne MacDonald - Artist's statement

Ornament: Photographs by Anne MacDonald
18 September to 26 October 2008
Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

Opening: 6pm, Thursday 18 September 2008

As tokens of love and remembrance, floral grave ornaments offer greater longevity than freshly cut
flowers. The fragile evanescence of real flowers has, since the 15th Century, made them ideal subjects
for representing the transience of life, mortality and death itself. 17th Century Vanitas painters in
particular used the iconography of withering flowers as allegories of time, loss and absence.

The photographic still life not only builds on the long history of vanitas imagery in art, but also brings
with it the additional association of the photograph as memento mori. Rebecca Solnit writes “All
photographs in a sense still life, freezing it as something no longer living, but virtually embalmed and
immortally immobile.”1 For Susan Sontag, “all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph
is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”2

Discussing floral memento mori, Geoffrey Batchen argues that the substitution of artificial flowers for
real ones “is emblematic of the process of embalming, which is an apt metaphor for photography,
which also chemically embalms its subject.”3

Like the photographic image, ornaments still life, yet, eventually they too fall prey to duration, and
slowly disintegrate through the inexorable passage of time, becoming elegiac metaphors for the
transience of existence; premonitions of death rather than evocations of eternal life

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