The Garden of Maggie Victoria

  • Dates
    2022 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Locations Chorley, Vancouver

This project honours my great-grandmother Maggie Victoria, who was largely forgotten within my family after dying at an early age in 1943. The series mixes family archive materials with my own contemporary images of the natural world, in order to share a dialogue with a woman to whom I owe my existence, and to restore her story, decades after her death.

I first came across my great-grandmother in January 2022 as I dug through the vast and rather unruly family 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 devastating, fast-moving illness, Maggie Victoria took her last breath in May 1943, aged 56. As was often the way back then, Frank re-married just 10 months later. With grief suppressed amidst the war, she was barely mentioned from then on, her life inadvertently erased.

She would never meet her grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, of whom I am one.

In scouring the archives with my mother and uncle (two of her grandchildren), I have got to know her - through the photographs left behind, the officialdom that punctuated her life, and the letters she and others wrote close to her death.

This body of work combines those materials with my own photography in a series of composites. She was a prolific gardener, so I am responding by incorporating my own, mostly nature-oriented images from Vancouver – many miles and decades away.

Driven by a desire for connection with the past to better 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 series considers the changing nature of female identity and representation, as well as how archives influence our understanding of the “truth” about someone.

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

The submitted images are part of a growing project in which I consider other themes, such as the roles and representation of women in the early 20th century; what it means when a person’s life is mediated through others; and how archives influence our understanding of the “truth” about a person.

The work in progress may be viewed on my website at: https://www.rachelnixon.com/work-in-progress

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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1. Unfurling There are few images of my great-grandmother Maggie Victoria before her marriage. The ones we do have paint a picture of an upstanding young woman coming of age just after the turn of the 20th Century. A “tailoress” before getting married, she embroidered this tablecloth with the names of friends and family, surrounding her own maiden name. The portrait was shot at a local photographer’s studio - to mark her 21st birthday, we believe. I made the image of the ferns as a symbol of the life ahead of her.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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2. Just Married Maggie Victoria married Frank Sellers in Chorley, Lancashire in the midst of World War I. Although we have their marriage certificate recording this fact, we do not have any photos from the wedding. These images mark their engagement. Interestingly, certificates at the time were validated with an actual stamp.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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3. Beach Days After their marriage in 1915, Maggie Victoria and Frank went on to have two daughters and a son. I made these images in Vancouver, Canada, wanting to connect with my great-grandmother on my favourite beach, and hoping she had enjoyed hers.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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4. Flowers in the Sand Unusually for this series, we think the old photo top left was made by Maggie Victoria herself and entered in a photography competition, since her name and address were written in her handwriting on the back. Those details are now embedded in the sand on the lower left of my image. Pictured top left are my grandmother Doris and great uncle Brian, her second and third children.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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5. Teach a Child to Fish Maggie Victoria and Frank’s three children are pictured on the left “fishing” in the garden, while a younger version of me is “fishing” on holiday with my grandad on the right. Frank’s waterlilies separate us between the decades. What connects us, though, aside from our apparent joy at fishing, is that our parents and grandparents very much valued the benefit of education and made sure we did too. In the case of their two daughters - my grandmother and great-aunt - Maggie Victoria and Frank made sure they studied beyond school and both went on to have careers of their own - quite forward-thinking for the 1930s and 40s. Certainly they had advantages that Maggie Victoria never had, and both parents worked hard for their family.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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6. Changing Tides Two very different images of Maggie Victoria taken on the same day at the seaside in the mid-1920s by her husband Frank. One carefree, the other much less so. A pivotal point in her adult life - looking back to happier times, and ahead to troubles both personal and political. I was at first puzzled why the photo of Maggie Victoria smiling (left) would be torn and folded - until my mother pointed out that someone likely kept it with them in their wallet. To make the wave images, I sought out the Pacific Ocean at different times and in varying conditions.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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7. You Turn Away From The Sun As I looked through the archive photos of Maggie Victoria, I noticed she almost always turned away from the camera, even when it was obvious she knew she was being photographed. As a sometimes camera-shy person, I can empathize with that, but it seems that she was hardly ever comfortable in the spotlight. I wish I could tell her that she deserved to take her place in the sun.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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8. A Slow Speed Maggie Victoria was proud of the garden she and her husband Frank created at their Lancashire home. In a letter to Gladys, her eldest daughter, we see the first signs of her failing health. She talks of her speed working in the garden being only “a slow one to-day”. I included my own image of lilac since she also complained of not having sufficient bunches of the flowers to give to friends that year. A month later, she would be gone.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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9. "We Take Too Much From Mothers" "I am afraid my Dear that we take too much from mothers, take too much for granted and allow them to work too hard." An extract from a letter sent by "Uncle John" (real name William) in Australia to my grandmother on learning of the tragic early death of her mother Maggie Victoria - his sister and my great-grandmother - in 1943. Maggie Victoria died in May and my grandmother's letter letting Uncle John know reached him only in mid-July. His reply, written immediately, took several more months to arrive from Australia, intercepted by the censor, as were all letters at the time. In the analogue image by my great-grandfather Frank, Maggie Victoria appears as usual to be taking care of everyone, including her grown children and her husband, whose propped-up feet are seen bottom right. I set her apart in the collage to draw attention to her for once, and to foreshadow her imminent absence, along with some sunny yet dark flowers.

© Rachel Nixon - Image from the The Garden of Maggie Victoria photography project
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10. Flowers for my Great-Grandmother The last photo taken of Maggie Victoria, tending to her garden. Her nurse wrote a letter to Maggie Victoria’s eldest daughter Gladys just a couple of days before her mother’s death. In it, she wrote that the “beautiful perfume” of two vases of lily of the valley were flooding the bedroom where her patient was resting.

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