As a parent, observing my child grow up filled me with wonder but also a sense of loss. In this series, I explore children’s birthday parties as symbols of bereavement and impermanence, examining the relationship between the photographic still life, transience, and mortality. On the surface, children’s birthday parties are joyous celebrations of life. Yet they also mark time’s inexorable passing. Their decorations, food, gifts, games, toys, and costumes change each year with the child's age, extending beyond ornament and artifice to symbolise a transitory childhood world. In these images, I have recreated ephemeral banquet scenes of party cakes and decorations. The images record the aftermath of the party, when the fun is over, the presents have been opened, the cake eaten and the guests have left.

Anne MacDonald

Photo artist Anne MacDonald does not depict the grossly rampant, tangled and trampled mew, the tumultuous chaos, confusion and clutter that we associate with boisterous children’s parties and the debris that is left behind after the last mother has collected her over-excited child.

Instead, a sense of emptiness, of stillness, of silence and fragility and loss pervades Anne MacDonald’s poignant images of the aftermath of a children’s birthday party. The clamour and noise is no longer. A spilt drink, cake crumbs, a spent party popper, a spatter of glitter, a few nonpareils, a discarded party hat, limp ribbons and a deflated balloon are all that remain; sad and solitary remnants that symbolize another passing birthday and yet another year of childhood gone. Her still life photographs are a paean, a touching homage. They are stylised tableaus; understated quasi memorials to the transience of childhood and a mother’s sense of the inevitability and loss experienced with each outwardly celebratory rite of passage associated with the annual birthday party.

Barbara Dowse