What Happened To Remain Unsaid
Graphite on paper, Graphite on found papaer, Graphite on paper mounted on found paper.
Within Aubrey Menen's Autobiography 'The Space Within The Heart', Menen recounts a series of events leading him to work for The British in India overseeing and surveilling adivasi's in a jungle. Starting from performing a sex act with another man for a white women's interest in the mechanics of same-sex practices (who was part of the Bloomsbury group), he discovers his mother has had a private detective surveilling him - he had previously been taken to court for his play "Genesis", and was about to be reported for sodomy and had been working for a prolonged period for The India League attempting to aid in the decolonisation from British rule. At this point his Indian father helps him escape to India working for his upper class relatives where he now helps in the cultural production of the anti-war effort this. Written through a series of flashbacks, and Jamesian construction he awakes from a terror (then) realising his enmeshment in the colonisation of India and its futility. And again in Rome after converting to catholocism all the way back through his Irish mother's indoctrination by Catholic Missionaries, and a brown doll.
Midnight Horror is also the english name for a plant based within Indian Jungles, where a tree's pods appear like hanging swords and fall to its roots appearing like a mass of broken bones.
In What Happens To Remain Unsaid, Maguire uses similar historical figures whose lives have been structured through mechanisms of subordination through sexuality through meticulously rendered drawings of objects and portraits. Including Anglo-Asian acctress Merle Oberon a child and grandchild of intergenerational rape on Indian tea plantations. He auses her visage and her uncanny, and synchronous appearance in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a film in which she transcends her racial ambiguity and acts alongside in a story that positions Oberon as Cathy against Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff a ‘wild’ racialised man.