Artist's Statement

Moira McDonald

Dense fog blankets the landscape here. Up on my coastal ridge I am cloaked in its cool grey; often for months on end I am kept enveloped in clouds. Very late in the night, the fog sits so thick and hangs so low it becomes a dense mist of individual droplets drifting in the night sky. The mornings are covered in wet, and by mid day the nights collection predictably disappears again - absorbed back into the ground, or evaporated again into the atmosphere.

I placed my darkroom trays out overnight to collect small puddles of the clouds to dip my silver papers in; they were then exposed on an overcast day until the fog was either absorbed by the paper or evaporated back into the atmosphere.

These photographs are traces of automated nature, of collecting and letting go, of natural breath, of process, and of intervention, participation and engagement within the landscape - these are photographs of the fog in Pacifica.