Unmoored : memory, place and time
Margaret Cahill has exhibited in London, New York, Berlin and Eastern Europe as well as widely in the UK. Her work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in the UK and abroad.
Cahill makes atmospheric expansive paintings that deal with memory and place. She is interested in recording and responding to places that are in a state of transition - spaces in between – places that evidence traces of powerful experiences. The images from such places become the starting point for paintings balanced between the real and imaginary that look beyond the landscape to distil the essence of a place capturing the sensations it evokes.
The artist’s ongoing preoccupation with sites of conflict and abandoned places has resulted in a photographic archive compiled from a number of projects across Europe from the Baltic to Berlin.
The paintings are rooted in the experience of these places but at the same time are mediated notions of landscape refracted through memory. They are informed by a particular place yet allow for a universal resonance.
Photographic images in the work give a sense of reality yet they float free of their given moment appearing to stand outside time. Less concerned with history and reality than with recollection and the shape shifting of memory, the paintings occupy a space of ambiguity between past and present unmooring our sense of place and time.
The work invokes notions around absence and the elusive nature of memory, both collective and personal, and raises questions about our relationship with the landscape in an increasingly uncertain and constantly shifting world.
