Making Visible Difficult Histories: Interview with Wendy McMurdo for ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’ at Alice Austen House

Installation Imagery, ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’ at Alice Austen House, New York, 2026. Photography © Taurat Hossain 

By GRACE PALMER October 25, 2026

“Community is about […] being ever mindful that we tell our stories within webs of power that distort them; and of course the important thing about a cat's cradle is that you can never let it collapse.” Writing in 1995/6, Sandy Stone’s speculative fictional essay ‘The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age’ considered the potential of a new world – one governed by digitality and online interfaces. Engaged with photography's technological precipice in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Wendy McMurdo took up Stone’s charge to uphold the cat’s cradle. Working at the intersection of photography, digital advancement, the natural world and social revelations, McMurdo’s oeuvre has sought to document cultural change, embrace and question digital interfaces and tell stories often overlooked in these cyberspace power webs. Since transitioning to photography at the Pratt Institute in the mid-80s, McMurdo’s work has toed the fine edge between aestheticism and contextualism. Inspired by the radicalism of New York’s Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler, and the surrealist tendencies of her supervisor, Hal Foster, she has embraced a visual, contextual artistic attitude. I spoke with Wendy McMurdo about this drive towards intentionality over pure aestheticism, how childhood became a quintessential subject matter, and the journey along Edinburgh’s Radical Road that ended in Staten Island at the Alice Austen House exhibition ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’.

Wendy McMurdo, The Radical Road (Pimpinella saxifraga), 2023, archival giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photorag, 36 x 48 cm (14 x 19 in – unframed measurements)

As an early patron of digital photography, McMurdo has witnessed the cyclical relationship artists have developed with the ‘unphysical’ interface. With the introduction of network gaming, multi-user domains, and microcomputers, the ‘90s saw profound digital expansion, excitement and, as McMurdo reveals, “free-floating anxiety about the impact of digitality, especially on photography.” Concerns with photographic authenticity simmered alongside Donna Haraway and Stone’s speculative potentials of what a new age of digitality might hold. For McMurdo, this was a stimulating time for the photographic landscape, and it bore the “genesis of [my] work”. It also began her lifelong fascination with computation - the possibilities of binary logic and datafication in establishing strands of algorithmic governance. As computation and digital technology changed each decade, McMurdo discovered her most “exciting and urgent subject” – childhood.

Literacy, schooling and shame are the three conditions that constitute the social construct of childhood – or at least that’s how sociologist Neil Postman saw it in the ‘80s. Postman deemed television and electronic media as a threat to these domains, eroding authority, literacy and, ultimately, the “disappearance of childhood”. Working in educational spaces, McMurdo’s first-hand experiences challenged Postman’s assertion. For her, the internet meant children were “roaming more widely, seeking out new spaces to play in, to learn, to garner information.” McMurdo recalls visiting children’s homes to photograph the very first internet-connected computers, documenting the changes happening within childhood and embracing both the creative and disparaging effects of a digitally ingrained adolescence. Her latest exhibition, ‘The Digital Mirror’ at the National Galleries of Scotland, explores the decades of change, harm and growth the internet has had on childhood. Childhood has not disappeared, as Postman claimed back in 1980. Instead, McMurdo reveals its scope for imaginative learning, its limitless and often fraught connectivity and the multitudinous domains that shape what childhood may be.

Installation Imagery, ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’ at Alice Austen House, New York, 2026. Photography © Taurat Hossain 

Dispelling the binaries between digitality and childhood has formed much of McMurdo’s subject matter. In the works included in ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’, McMurdo translates this investigatory attitude into the relationship between the natural and artificial. She wants this tension to reveal the “important social stories that often remain invisible” - achieving this immeasurably with the works at Alice Austen House: The Radical Road. McMurdo goes on to explain the significance behind the ‘Radical Road’:

“In 1820 there was a workers' revolt in the west of England - weavers striking for better working conditions. The government brutally suppressed the revolt. Some of them were sent to Australia; some were hanged; and those that remained were forced to build this thing that became known as the Radical Road - a path that runs up the side of the Salisbury Crags, in the centre of Edinburgh. This path was made of dolerite, one of the hardest stones known to man. It must have been such a hard job to build. I thought it was such a powerful story, and I wanted to make work that told that history - made it visible. So I managed to walk up the Radical Road (it's actually closed to the public), and I started to collect the plants that grew freely. Then I took them back to the studio and photographed them, and that’s when the project started.”

Wendy McMurdo, The Radical Road (Senecio jacobea), 2023, archival giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photorag, 36 x 48 cm (14 x 19 in – unframed measurements)

Undeniably, McMurdo’s flowers on display at Alice Austen House embrace their radicality, communicating the integral link between social history and nature. In her photographs, the land functions as a tool of memory, enduring beyond human history. These rare orchids and foliage that emerge along the Radical Road are revelatory binary opposites. Photographed in the negative, “like an X-ray in the body”, the flowers uncover a hidden history of Edinburgh’s landscape. As McMurdo explains, Radical Road “takes this delicate imagery and brings it together with something quite brutal and savage”, forever preserving the Radical Road’s legacy.

Wendy McMurdo shows no signs of slowing down. Along with her recent involvement with ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’ at the Alice Austen House, she is currently exhibiting at the National Galleries of Scotland for ‘The Digital Mirror’. Producing work is a constant in McMurdo’s life, often beginning with “an image or a trip that leads me down an inquiry or a walk.” Currently intrigued by old albumen prints of grottoes, she explains how “it’s a matter of reading, research and making that culminates in the image.” For her, research and intentionality are interlinked: “you have to make images that really draw people in. But there’s got to be something you want to say. Otherwise it becomes purely aesthetic, and I’m not into that.” As Radical Road perfectly encapsulates, Wendy McMurdo embraces the relationship between materiality, objects, stories and visuals, and this is “what makes creativity.”

Installation Imagery, ‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’ at Alice Austen House, New York, 2026. Photography © Taurat Hossain 

My thanks go to Wendy McMurdo for taking the time to discuss her recent projects and to Susan Bright and Hedy van Erp for their curatorship at the Alice Austen House.

‘Radical Botany: The Politics of Flowers’ ran between June 6 – 22 August 2026 at the Alice Austen House, Staten Island.