Anne MacDonald's work traverses the Vanitas still life genre, extending historical approaches by exploring the symbolic potential of objects within a contemporary cultural context. The photographic still life builds on the long history of vanitas imagery in art and brings the photograph's new association as memento mori. Photography has a unique connection with still life and death due to its ability to arrest time and literally still life. Photographs also contain a realisation of loss by recording a past moment that no longer exists. Anne MacDonald draws on these associations to create elegiac metaphors for the ephemerality and mutability of existence.
The cemetery affords a rich source of imagery for Anne MacDonald's investigation into the themes of entropy and decay. For her installation Ornament 2008, she photographed Victorian floral grave decorations. In Ornament, Anne MacDonald considers how funerary ornaments are like photographs. They still life yet eventually fall prey to time and slowly disintegrate, becoming premonitions of death rather than evocations of eternal life.
Anne MacDonald's interest in floral ornamentation is related to a long-term fascination with funerary bouquets and wreaths. In Petal 2000, she photographed blooming and withering flowers and isolated petals, capturing the fragile evanescence of flowers as a poignant symbol of mortality.
While photographing petals, Anne MacDonald saw visual links to cloth as well as flesh. Her petals reference the funerary bouquet, the funeral shroud, and the corpse. This led to the creation of Annunciation 1994–5 and Silk 2005–6, in which opulent silks and brocades are stitched, torn, crumpled, stained and tattered, subject to the same vagaries of corporeal existence as the body.
The experience of motherhood shifted Anne MacDonald's visual language from traditional still-life tropes to artefacts drawn from childhood. Unlike the slowly evolving adult, children change rapidly, almost daily. For Anne MacDonald, the brevity and unrepeatability of childhood is a powerful memento mori.
In Party 2013, Anne MacDonald investigated children's birthday parties as symbols of loss and impermanence. Children's parties are vital social rituals, and on the surface of things, joyous and festive celebrations of life. However, on another level, they are melancholic indicators of time's inexorable passing. In Party, Anne MacDonald concentrates on the aftermath of the child's birthday banquet, where the tumultuous chaos and exuberance of the day are replaced by the dull realisation that another passing birthday is over and yet another year of childhood gone.
Children's birthday parties focus heavily on sugar-laden treats. This led to Anne MacDonald's 2016 project Sugar, where she continued exploring childhood, consumption and mortality. Sugar first appeared as a symbol of luxury in 16C desert and confectionary still life paintings. No longer a luxury, sugar is ubiquitous in food and is addictive, with the toxic effects of high sugar consumption now widely known. It is ironic that we celebrate each birthday with sugary cakes and treats that potentially hasten life's passing.
During her investigation of childhood and material culture, Anne MacDonald became interested in how gender is constructed and encoded during childhood. In Pink 2011, Anne MacDonald examined the abundance of the colour pink within the consumer culture of girl's toys. Created as accessories to children's fantasies and imaginative play, the role of children's toys extends beyond mere ornament and artifice to become powerful accoutrements to the transitory and impressionable childhood world. Chosen for their allusions to girlishness, cuteness and sweetness, Anne MacDonald's photographs of pink toys raise questions about monochromatic, one-dimensional and typecast representations of women.
Anne MacDonald returned to her investigation of gender colour coding in her work Pink & Blue. Commenced in 2018 she revisited this project in 2023. Pink & Blue aims to question why we attribute gender-specific colours to baby products. Is this practice merely to increase consumption, or does it also reflect a simplistic and arbitrary pink-blue worldview of femininity and masculinity?
In her 2021 series, Love, Anne MacDonald employs the visual tropes of consumerism to explore the ephemeral representations that contemporary society falls back on in our search to express love and maintain connection. Visual expressions of love proliferate on social media sites such as Instagram and Pinterest. Centred around purchasing and arranging decorations for Valentine’s Day events, these images are exuberant, celebratory, joyful and fun. Masses of gleaming foil balloons in the form of love hearts and declarations - Love, XO, Be Mine - are disarmingly charming yet ultimately ephemeral. These perfectly styled Valentine's party scenes, in luscious pink and vivid blood red, with their connotations of excess and indulgence, also evoke more complicated emotions. We know the romantic ideal of love, popular in social media, falls short of real love. We also know that events like Valentine’s Day can heighten feelings of rejection, loneliness and isolation. Finally, we know our inordinate love of consumption has led us to a world on the brink of environmental disaster. Despite this, we cannot seem to break the cycle of desire, where too much is never enough. In her Valentine’s Day scenes, tinged with humour and pathos, the decorations have been abandoned; the party is cancelled before it begins.
The transient nature of existence remains an enduring theme in Anne MacDonald’s 2022 project Ghost.
Of this work, Anne MacDonald writes:
Inspired by Halloween and its references to the supernatural and the afterlife, Ghost is a series of still images exploring the expressive qualities of drapery, shroud-like forms, darkness and the void, hot and cool colours and lustrous, holographic, iridescent surfaces. The history of art is filled with representations of cloth, primarily as the dress of figures but also as curtains, bedding and shrouds. Since the Renaissance, drapery has featured heavily in still-life imagery, performing the function of backdrop, table cover or simply as a decorative or expressive element. Victorian Spirit Photography used darkroom trickery and muslin to create ghostly apparitions. During the creation of Ghost, I became fascinated with the behaviour of materials transformed through the process of photography, taking on a life of their own and becoming animated through the act of being photographed. In this suite of works, silk, satin organza, cellophane, and foil smother, fall, fold, tangle, flow, spill, twist and unfurl centre stage in the twilight atmosphere of my dimly lit studio. The material's mutability, shifting forms, and shimmering surfaces speak of immaterial things: the life force, evanescence, and the constant flow of time.