the Self Portrayed

Two artists have been commissioned by Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums to interpret a collection of 94 Victorian portraits and create an artwork in dialogue.

Annalee Davis and Richard Maguire were selected as part of the Self Portrayed commission series. The series is based on Alexander Macdonald’s portrait collection from 1878. All the uniformly sized portraits show male artists from the era, many of whom Macdonald had friendships with. Over half are self portraits and include names like Sir John Everett Millais, Joseph Farquharson, Jules Breton and John Singer Sargent.

Annalee Davis is an artist working with post-plantation economies, engaging with the land where she lives & works.

Davis’ work Self as Plot is a meditation on the self as entangled within the notion of place. Their studio is located on a working dairy farm in Barbados, a small island once referred to as Britain’s first sugar isle. Topographic lines of embroidered thread show the contour lines of the Dairy, punctuated with faint straight stitches which suggest the walking ritual the artist undertakes regularly at dawn or dusk.

Motherwort and Cerasee leaves grown in the artists own garden are located at the top right and left corners. Botanicals like these would grow in hedgerows of sugar cane fields, and again bring our attention back to the past in order to more deeply understand the present. These plants would also be grown in small plots of land given to the enslaved, who nurtured these healing plants used in bush teas, bush baths and bush medicines. These plots, sites of community, care, and tradition in Barbadian enslaved African society, didn’t conform to the geometry of the plantation, suggesting other ways of being.

Richard Maguire graduated with a Masters in Print Media from The Glasgow School of Art, he has exhibited internationally and has works in collections including The Royal Collection.

Maguire’s work Made in England: A View from this Side also considers the self as something greater than a single entity. Reflecting on the way his identity has often been interpreted, Maguire has refused to portray himself as a single being or ‘subject’, in the way that self-representation has often been siphoned as either “racial subject” or possessing an identity thought to only be formed through “sexual identity”. In merging historic and personal images, Maguire represents self through a midst of others, seeing individuals in relation to each other, rather than separate.

Maguire initiated the work to merge scenes of love and care in opposition to particular ideas that have historically maligned South Asian men as hostile, violent and homophobic. Using images from historical archives, as well as family archives, Maguire shows the collective and individual levels of being. An image taken by his grandfather Asis Sarker shows a group of South Asian doctors that had recently immigrated, overlayed with an image of  the artist himself as a young child, holding a doll and embraced by his grandfather. The other of Maguire’s gorgeously rendered drawings in graphite, show another image of the doctors overlaid with a portrait of Hijra. Hijra is an ancient terminology used to describe gender variant people, encompassing modern day feminine homosexuals, third gender, and transgender populations within the Indian Subcontinent.

These new commissions interrupt our current display of the historic Macdonald portraits in Gallery 01, Aberdeen Art Gallery.