Rachel Nixon

Artist Statement

My great-grandmother Maggie Victoria Sellers was largely forgotten within my family after dying at an early age in 1943. This project mixes family archive materials with my own contemporary images, to share a dialogue with a woman to whom I owe my existence, and to restore her story, decades later.

I first came across my great-grandmother in January 2022 as I dug through our family’s archives. Her somehow familiar face emerged from a cache of photos mostly captured by her husband - my great-grandfather Frank - a colourful businessman and keen photographer in Lancashire, England.

Following a fast-moving illness, Maggie Victoria took her last breath in May 1943, aged 56. As was often the way, Frank re-married just 10 months later. With grief suppressed amidst war, she was barely mentioned from then on, her life inadvertently erased.

In scouring the archives with my mother and uncle (two of her grandchildren), I have got to know her - through photographs, the officialdom punctuating her life, and letters written close to her death.

This series of digital composites combines those materials with my own, mainly nature-oriented images made in Vancouver, thousands of miles away. My goal is to honour her role as a mother, a gardener, a woman.

Driven by a desire for connection with the past to understand my place in the world, The Garden of Maggie Victoria explores the power of revived memory and grief for someone I never met. This project has enabled me to develop a deeper understanding of choices my family made during troubled times.

This growing series also considers themes including: evolving female identity and representation; what it means when a person’s life is mediated through others; and how archives influence our understanding of someone.

Anchored in a personal meditation, issues of family, heritage, place and the passing of time touch on experiences affecting us all.

Rachel Nixon | Vancouver, British Columbia

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