About Margaret

Margaret Fisher’s work continues an exploration of the artist’s long held interest in creating multi-layered, collage backgrounds for her polo portraits and images of Cairo. She exploits the textures of paper, discarded artwork, and natural objects to add depth to her acrylic and oil paintings under layers of paint. The artist’s two new bodies of work, Views of Cairo and Polo Portraits use this stylistic approach on the authentic, realistic images which are emblematic of her work. 

The artist collects old textbooks, maps, diagrams, and even discarded artwork to create visually, rich paintings. By starting off with unconventional bases of materials on her canvases, the artist is able to re-appropriate the physical discards of our present contemporary, consumer-driven, disposable era and creates an aesthetic, which serves as a cautionary tale, addressing the issues of an irreversibly polluted environment and our desperate attempts at sustainability, hidden beneath a beautiful stylised representation of the real world. The initial collage of manmade and organic material gives the artist a visual starting point, creating a palimpsest which enables, in the words of the artist “creating something beautiful from the unwanted discards of an entitled, careless generation.” 

The artist’s delicate and time-intensive process involves successive layering of collage, acrylic and ink, at times, deconstructing the constructed surface. She enjoys and employs conventional and non conventional approaches to create a harmonious endpoint.

The portraits, images and landscapes in the artist’s most recent series are subjects in and of themselves. With her endlessly intricate, multi-layered compositions, the artist brings to life a Cairo scene or polo player with each of her paintings. 

“The paintings are assembled, designed, constructed, and deconstructed, metamorphosing into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

The paintings in Margaret’s Views of Cairo series make further use of this concept by idealizing iconic scenes of Cairo that evoke a sentimental reaction from expatriots and natives alike, but are built on the reality of our contemporary, pernicious society, juxtaposing an honest likeness with an urbane aesthetic creating something which is both refined and authentic.

Margaret had lived and worked in Cairo for 25 years