Margaret Cahill

Margaret Cahill studied Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University graduating in 1995 and since then has lectured in Fine Art at Bolton University. Cahill creates disturbingly beautiful images in paintings of vast atmospheric spaces with a sense of memory and moment. Balanced between truth and invention they offer the possibility for narrative and meaning yet remain elusive. Photographing real structures, manipulating the images and then transforming them through painting she creates an alternative place that evokes the real one and yet retains its identity as a place apart.

Much of the imagery used in her recent work relates to photographs taken on and around an abandoned buildings both in the UK and abroad including a Soviet airbase in Estonia. The discrepancy between the beauty of the painted landscape and the desolate structures combined with a subtle playfulness of scale contribute to an unsettling edge in the paintings.

Through these elements the work increasingly references modern climate concerns and anxieties, natural disasters, conflict and displacement. The paintings invite the viewer to look again, contemplate and engage in questions about ambiguity and fact, absence and presence, transience and mortality.

Margaret Cahill has built up a reputation exhibiting widely in the North West of England, most recently at The Walker Gallery, Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial in 2006, New York, Stockholm, Estonia and Japan.

“Margaret Cahill’s work conjures a vivid feeling of disorientation. Her technique is astonishing, mixing photographic images of remote buildings with layered, watery oil paints. As raging flood tides rise under swathes of cloud, Cahill manages to subtly reference modern climate concerns and the recent spate of freak worldwide meteorological disasters producing truly 21st-century landscapes”.

Steve Pill