Tanya Malott is a fine art photographer and multidisciplinary artist based in Hudson, NY. Trained in architecture at Columbia University in New York and Paris, she shifted to photography more than three decades ago, building a global career in portrait, fashion, and luxury wedding photography for leaders in the arts, business, and culture. The daughter and sister of architects, Tanya’s sensitivity to structure, light, and atmosphere now finds new form in encaustic mixed-media works.
Her current series, Future Ghosts of Hudson, merges photography, wax, rice paper, and gold leaf to evoke the layered history and atmosphere of Hudson’s architecture. Dreamlike, tactile, and luminous, these works reflect both the fragility of the past and the spirit of a city in constant transformation.
Artist Statement
This series, Future Ghosts of Hudson, is an exploration of impermanence, memory, and spirit. Using encaustic wax, rice paper, gold leaf, and pigment, I layer photographs taken on my twice-daily dog walks around Hudson into luminous surfaces that feel more like paintings than prints.
The wax allows me to merge fragments of the city — brick facades, peeling paint, reflections in shop windows — with the flowers, foliage, and shifting light that weave through them. Mannequins appear ghostlike in windows; vines climb over stone; petals soften the edges of decay. In this way, architecture and nature entwine, echoing Hudson itself: a place that holds history and reinvention in equal measure.
Encaustic has become my perfect medium, where photography transforms into something more tactile, more atmospheric, layered like memory. These works are less about documenting a specific street than about evoking the aura of the place — the sense that we are all just passing through, future ghosts ourselves.