Margo Maeckelberghe: Extended Landscape
This is the first solo show at Tate St Ives of Cornish-born painter Margo Maeckelberghe (b 1932). Renowned for her expressive seascapes and barren landscapes, these works draw upon her evolving career since the 1950s.
Born, trained and based in Cornwall, Maeckelberghe's paintings are in many private and public collections both in the UK and abroad. But her Cornish works represent her identity as a native female painter, offering a feeling of belonging, or sense of place, perhaps expressed most strongly in works made from the Carn, a rocky outcrop near the coast above Zennor, where she has owned a cottage and studio since the 1960s.
Developed from close observational studies and often abstracted from the characteristics of an open vista or secluded cove, Maeckelberghe's paintings not only evoke her personal experiences of a particular landscape, but also its social and geological histories. Exploring the tensions between natural forces and human presence, they bring together narratives of climatic turmoil, atmospheric changes or primordial evolution and erosion.