Margaret Cogsdill

Margaret Cogsdill, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, received her BA in Philosophy from The College of Charleston in South Carolina. Later she studied photography at Georgia State University and The Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2013 she received her MFA in Imaging Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work explores themes related to memory, loss and nostalgia. She is currently a contemporary artist based in upstate New York.

View more of Margaret's work here

Artist Statement

The Space Between Us explores the notion of loss as an overarching theme by examining a mother’s illness and its profound impact on her daughter. My work is inspired by a desire to understand my relationship with my mother, Caroline. Throughout my life I have struggled to accept her illness and its impact on me. Through photography, performance, and imaginative play I am able to initiate a new relationship with her and to explore intimacy, connection, nostalgia, and loss. Through this body of work, my mother and I enter into a world of our imagination where we collaborate as artist and mother. We work from a desire to express a time before she was ill and to recognize and reinvent who we are now, and who we can become in the future. As a daughter I turn my lens towards my mother as well as towards my own legacy. I incorporate the familial through a lineage of women and investigate the domestic spaces they inhabit. I look to my grandmother’s house and the surrounding landscape as a place of refuge and contemplation while also shedding light on feelings of fear, melancholia, and disorientation. Woven together, these images create a narrative that speaks to the complexity, richness and ambiguity of our relationship. he fragmented narrative relects my inability to wholly make sense of my mother’s illness. I have struggled to understand, but I am let trying to embrace the uncertainty and meaning of my circumstances.