Traditionally Vanitas include the symbols of an industrious life – books, scientific instruments and artists tools: the accoutrements of worldly luxury and idle pursuits – cards, coins, brimming goblets, musical instruments; and thirdly, the category that fascinates me above all, the emblems of passing time – fallen petals, skulls and burning candles, bruised fruits, the scattered remains of a sumptuous banquet. A wedding cake can be a symbol of life in flower. Years later, the same wedding cake can be a symbol of ruin and death. The frivolous ribbons and frothy trailing trimmings of icing roses echo the ornamental fripperies of Vanitas paintings. Preserved sugar perfection turns towards decomposition.

Anne MacDonald

Vanitas draws on several sources, which include Seventeenth Century Dutch Vanitas paintings – reminders of the evanescence of life – in which faint hints of decay can be detected in food as well as flowers. A literary source is Miss Havisham’s ghastly wedding banquet in Great Expectations, where the passage of time and the work of spiders have reduced the celebratory cake to a gothic ruin. MacDonald has a facility for extracting the essence of meaning from her sources by the compositional device of relocation. Her wedding cake, having been ‘consumed’ by time, is draped in cobwebs and cast with the blue of decomposition. A sumptuous, seductive image which carries its own reminder of corruption, like the faint bruise on a peach.

Victoria Hammond