Ghungroo
Platform, Edinburgh Art Festival 2023

The work builds on research into Peggy Hall, a child sent to Scotland from India alongside an enslaved woman (perhaps her mother), who was then ‘returned’ to India, as she was considered by the British government to be an ‘illegal object’.

What is so magnetic about Maguire’s practice is his interest in materiality – particularly in his drawings depicting photographs from various archives. Each of the drawings layer two photographs together with the effect of double exposure, creating more detail and more content, and simultaneously less clarity. Where the edges of the neat frame and mount are sharp and clean, the line work and material effect of the graphite is fluid and undefined. These aspects of Maguire’s works speak to the obscurity faced when engaging with misunderstood histories: indeed, he found it very difficult to find concrete information on the life of Peggy Hall, whose records were destroyed in a fire.


Peggy’s story will also be present in the objects on display at Platform: imagined recreations of her jewellery that were recorded in a shipping log. Through these objects, Maguire thinks about people’s status as objects, but also what objects Peggy herself may have owned. Jewellery plays a huge part in South Asian matrilineal heritage, and it is where a woman might find autonomy through those objects passed down from her mother. Placed next to the drawings and their commentary on hidden histories, the shining physical presence of the jewellery will add a visible and tangible weight to Peggy and her story: seen and felt and found in the room.

Maguire cannot (and does not try to) totally resolve Peggy’s pain or repair a heavy history of colonialism, but he does offer a gesture of repair and healing: an effort to see Peggy and her intimate reality. Archives can easily be active acts of colonial othering: information is hard to find, and people are spoken about in callous numerical terms of their inventory or monetary worth. But Maguire’s intervention of the archive brings emotion, intimacy and warmth to how we engage with history and its people. Time and colonial erasure might stand in the way of us knowing each other fully, but Maguire’s work brings us a little bit closer.



Text by Laura Balliman, commissioned and produced by The Skinny.

Encased wooden structure was made by Simon Worthington:

©All works copyright Richard Maguire, images provided courtesy of Edinburgh Art Festival. Photographs by Sally Jubb

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