Anne MacDonald

Silk pure and ruined

4 to 29 April 2006

Each of these immaculate photographs seems like a revelation of the expressive power of fabrics in art. On first seeing them, two things immediately sprang to mind: their clear associations with Renaissance painting, and their correspondence with an ancient Greek myth. This last is one of few narratives to pivot on the symbolic power and age-old allure of luxurious fabrics, and it is the intensity of Anne MacDonald’s photographs - the quality of the fabrics as emanations of light – together with the dark presence of vanitas, that reminded me of the myth. The story goes like this. Glauce, a princess of Corinth betrothed to the hero Jason, received a wedding gift in an envelope of silk. When the parcel was unwrapped and its contents revealed the young princess and her ladies stood back murmuring in amazement, for inside was a garment of marvellous beauty. The figured cloth from which it was made gleamed as if woven by a magic hand; and when lifted from its envelope the tunic floated into graceful folds as if it had a life of its own. Impatient to see its effect, Glauce had her ladies drape it about her while another of them fetched a large mirror.

Enjoying the gown’s silken caress, Glauce stood before the mirror, captivated by her own reflection. The garment bestowed upon her an aura of unimaginable splendour. It had re-created her as a work of art. She spun around, delighting in the swinging movements of the swishing fabric. So dazzling and alluring was she that Jason would doubtless fall upon his knees in adoration of her.

The princess ran outside to greet Jason on his return, hardly aware of a prickling sensation in her skin. In the sunlight the gown took on a celestial radiance and she stood entranced by the shimmering of its golden edging. The prickling became a burning itch. Her face grew pale, then livid, as the magnificent garment clung to her in a deadly embrace, squeezing the very breath out of her so that she could barely scream, “Take it off! Take it off!” as she clawed frenziedly at the fleshy fabric. But even as her ladies attempted to remove it, the enchanted cloth stuck faster as it interacted with the light, growing darkly stained in the places where its vibrant colours released their poisons and dissolved into the princess’s flesh.

The exquisite material of the gown had indeed been woven by a magic hand: that of the gift-giver, the divine witch Medea. She had fashioned the bewitching garment with its cunningly concealed gift of death as retribution, because the princess  - so much younger than she - had stolen from her the love of Jason. And just as Medea had schemed, Jason on his arrival at the scene found not a vision of living perfection, but a spectacle of disintegration and death. Not even strong Jason could remove the magic garment - now stained, creased, ripped and tear-marked - for in places it had become inseparable from the princess’s flesh, and so, its rents carefully stitched by the ladies, it served as Glauce’s shroud and on what was to have been their wedding day she was buried in it.

It is hardly necessary to identify which of the individual photographs in Silk appear to have absorbed key moments of this ancient vanitas tale, but I do wish to point out that part of the appeal of this story with regard to MacDonald is the way the interaction of the light on the magic fabric mimics the function of her camera and photography’s chemical processes – not to mention the lurking presence of death in both instances.  Even the mirror in the story is echoed by the oval dressing-mirror format of the photographs. Though a drama about powerful emotions - love, passion, jealousy and revenge - the fate of Glauce is in essence a symbolic story of beauty’s fatal attraction: the more perfectly beautiful the object, the more elusive, and the more subject to dissolution and catastrophe – which is exactly what Anne MacDonald’s photographs, whether of flowers, wedding cakes or fabrics, have always been about.

Fabrics were similarly associated with intense emotions – often involving death or its insidious presence - in Renaissance paintings.  Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition (c.1435) is the chief inspiration for this current series of Anne MacDonald’s photographs. As is the case with many such paintings, our eyes are so fixed on the faces and human gestures in the drama, we barely notice that two-thirds of the composition is given over to draperies and embossed materials. And it is the way light falls on these fabrics, together with their colours, folds and movement, that emphasise the grief of the mourners as Christ’s limp body is taken down from the cross, and give the painting its dynamism and aesthetic cohesion. MacDonald has picked up on details in the painting – a gold-edged red tunic, the sensuality of the Magdalene’s gown, Nicodemus’s richly embossed cloak; the blue folds of Mary’s mantle and the rich vermillion of John’s - and found costly fabrics in Madrid and Florence with colours, patterns and textures that have this kind of suggestive richness and intensity. The rip and fine stitching in No 4 may be a reference to the five gashes running with blood on Christ’s otherwise immaculate body, for MacDonald often equates fabric with flesh.

In these and other vanitas details there is a feminine aspect to the making of the photographs in Silk: cutting, sewing and staining, as well as folding and arranging in order to control the fall of light to create contrasts of intense luminosity and shadowy folds.  Sometimes the effect is painterly: the creeping stain in No 14; the way the frayed edge of No 5 bleeds into the black; the decorative golden border of No 1, which recalls Rembrandt’s illusionistic brushwork or Titian’s portraits of popes and cardinals in their regal reds. The intense vermillion of this photograph – a blood red - all but pulsates with life and the word that best describes the image is ‘majestic’ – strange, given that there is no figure in it.

The absence of figures in MacDonald’s photographs, where it is fabrics that elicit qualities associated with a human presence, is a culmination of developments in draped art that go back to classical times. By the High Renaissance the movement, majesty and suggestive poetry of fabrics took on a purely artistic life, and with the advent of the Baroque period, silken cascades and voluptuous billowings, by virtue of being pure artifice, came to stand for art itself. It was no mere case of art for art’s sake: fabrics were there to invoke the power of art, just as they do in Anne MacDonald’s photographs. Beauty, said the American painter Agnes Martin, is the mystery of life, and art has a tremendous power in serving to reawaken our awareness of it.

Victoria Hammond

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