"Silk 2005-6" by Anne MacDonald, Australia
Working exclusively in the studio, I make photographs that explore the emotional anxiety
created in the counterpoise between beauty, opulence and the erotic on the one hand, and
fragility death and dissolution on the other. My subjects are fixed – virtually embalmed –
through the photographic process, and therefore raise the inevitable connection between
photography and death.
Silk 2005-6 explores the potential for ornamentation to act as an elegiac metaphor for the
transience of existence. The inspiration for photographing richly embellished silk
brocades, hanging as loose drapes or reposing in an irregular poetry of random folds,
in pristine condition or stained and tattered, comes from Renaissance art. Silk is reminiscent
of splendidly decadent renaissance religious robes, funeral shrouds, and the feeling
of sensuous entrapment created by bed sheets.