About the Artist
Margaret’s imagery is carefully constructed from her own photography and borrowed elements from sources such as fabrics, garments, wallpaper, or books with an oriental influence. Her favourite muse is the Japanese dancer, Chisato Minamimura, who performed improvised dance and a number of sequences of sign language for the Deaf (Chisato is deaf) for Margaret’s camera.
Margaret strives for a spiritual elegance and simplicity in her finished works, in contrast to the lengthy, complicated process of making. A poem or phrase or idea is given to the dancer as a starting point, from which the work evolves. Further layers add new constructs until the etching process translates the final image into a coherent whole, with rich textures and delicate colour combinations. The addition of birds, flowers and other elements allows the viewer a window into the subconscious inner world, a different reality to the visible.
Margaret’s interest in the orient stems from a family collection of Chinese and Japanese ceramics and embroideries which she was familiar with as a child. She was recently invited to the Guanlan Print Base in southern China as an International Artist in Residence. Margaret’s work is in a number of collections in China including the Guandong Museum of Art and Shenzhen University.