Artist Margo in Margate: We need women to show that we can take up space

Artist Margo in Margate has said she hopes her new gallery show helps “make women visible” and contradict misogynist narratives of influencers such as Andrew Tate.

The former teacher, real name Margo McDaid, left the London primary school she worked at in 2006 after one of her pupils and her mother was murdered by the mother’s boyfriend.

McDaid said the incident left her “ill” and “broken” and she still thinks about the little girl “every single day.”

She credits painting with helping her heal, and also express her passion for advocating for women.

Her new show of all-female paintings, Sisters With Secrets, opens at The Pie Factory gallery in Margate, Kent, on Friday, helping to raise funds for domestic violence services.

She told the Press Association: “It’s really a nod to the fact that lots of women do have secrets, and you don’t realise what women endure and experience, but they turn up and they’re brilliant and they’re bright and they’re funny.

“Behind that is all these layers of what women experience, which is not obvious. Domestic violence is a massive issue, and you meet women and they’re traumatised, but they still have this vibrancy about them, and that’s what I’m trying to capture in  my work, that vibrant energy that women bring.”

She continued: “I worked as a teacher in King’s Cross for ten years, and in that part of London, we had a huge bunch of children who were really vulnerable. There was a Women’s Refuge around the corner, and so we took children from that refuge.

“So we were working all the time with vulnerable kids, but also it was their mothers.

“These women who suffered a huge trauma and abuse, and they still carry on.

“I was really, really ill after that little girl died, and I just felt so broken. And painting is my way of healing.”

She continued: “I knew this little girl. I knew she was vulnerable. The school knew she was vulnerable.

“I was in a really good school, and the ethos of the school was loving, caring, brilliant energy, and everything that the school could have done was was spot on, they got everything right in that case. But it wasn’t enough.

“A really violent man (killed them) and it was just horrific. And I still get upset about that, because how could you not? How is this still happening? Why is it still happening?”

Discussing how painting has helped her recover from the horror of what happened to her pupil and her mother, McDaid said: “I’m a woman, and I defend the rights of women and and I think in a world of Andrew Tates, you need bright, beautiful women to contradict that and show that we can take up space.”

She added: “I’ve had men come in and be abusive (about my art). One man came into the gallery and he said: “Why are none of their mouths open?”

“Why would their mouth be open? Why would you want women to have their mouth open in a painting? You don’t get to come in and tell me what I should be painting or what they should look like.

“Making women visible is really important. And when people say to me: ‘Why do you only paint women?’ I think: ‘Why not? Why not just paint women?’

“If I was a landscape artist and I painted mountains nobody would ever say: ‘Why just paint mountains?'”

She continued: “That man that walked past the gallery said: “Why are their mouths not open?” – it’s all part of it, all part of the system that thinks women should be there to do what? To facilitate a world for men.

“In my heart, I think about her (the little girl at school) every single day and when I’m painting, because her mum was a really happy, beautiful, dancing, gorgeous woman. They were genuinely really happy people.

“She shared happiness and it does inspire my work, as my work is about my love for life.”

Sisters With Secrets is at The Pie Factory in Margate until April 20.