Lives and works in Tasmania, Australia.
Anne MacDonald received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts from the Tasmanian School of Art at the University of Tasmania, where she is now a Senior Lecturer in the Photography Department.
Anne has been practicing and exhibiting as an artist since the 1980’s and has held numerous solo exhibitions at contemporary art spaces and commercial galleries throughout Australia and internationally.
Anne MacDonald endeavours to represent the unrepresentable – death itself. Her photographic series and installations are symbolic distillations of death, eliciting the presence of beauty in objects reminiscent of the body and mortality.
Working exclusively in the studio with a large format camera, MacDonald’s photographs explore the emotional anxieties created in the counterpoise between beauty, opulence, femininity and the erotic on the one hand, and fragility, death, decay and dissolution on the other. Her subjects are fixed – virtually embalmed – through the photographic process, and thus raise the inevitable connection between photography and death.
Her work can be found in public and private collections around Australia including: the National Gallery of Australia, the University of Tasmania, Artbank, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and the ANZ collection.
