ANNE ARDEN MCDONALD

Approaching her darkroom process like a sort of alchemy, Anne Arden McDonald captures a dialogue nebulously drifting between mediums by testing materials and techniques through experimentation, noting variables, and observing the results, and amending processes.

Completely camera-less and without a conventional negative, McDonald layers nontraditional materials like bleach, clusters of soap bubbles, and/or hundreds of household spices and cleaners, steering the creation of these unconventional images. Each unconventional photogram is further manipulated through a series of techniques – scrubbing, evaporating or decaying – illustrating the circuitous nature of life, death, and what comes after. The resulting photographs, with a rather magnificent spherical quality, are McDonald’s manifestation of both the macro- and micro-cosmos within our universe.