Anna McCauley

I work across mediums to create intriguing and playful encounters that puncture the common sense of capitalism. I interpret economic analysis through intuitive associations drawn from a sculptural index of motifs and materials.  

My capstone work, Immaculate Conception, is a meditation on value. The installation explores the kinetic potential of liquid by incorporating it into sequences with responsive materials. It makes manifest the liquid metaphors used to describe capital: flow, trickle-down, liquidity, flood, pool, and freeze. Neither liquid nor value have an inherent form; their forms appear only in relation. This formal fluidity allows the source of value—the labour of workers—to be obscured. It is as though value simply appeared, as if by immaculate conception.  

As liquid flows throughout the installation, it generates new surfaces that reflect, obscure and distort. This movement simulates the changing forms of appearance of value within the cycle of capitalist accumulation. Matter is animated by its own propensity in a sculptural performance. The melting of ice sets a timescale both meditative and charged with anticipation, evoking that which is at stake in capital’s dictate towards accumulation.  

‘Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal,
taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping;
the quickened and the deadened, whirling on’
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty 

website: https://annaindiaart.weebly.com/
instagram: ethyl_ephedrine

Detail from Immaculate Conception, 2025, showing copper pipe, chain ice, red dune sand from Arrernte country, box metal, acrylic sheet, cast bronze. Photo by Teagan Lown.
Installation shot from Immaculate Conception 2025. Photo: Teagan Lown
Detail of Immaculate Conception, 2025, showing chain, mirror, cast bronze, and red dune sand from Arrernte Land. Photo courtesy of artist.
Anna McCauley