As Cornish as the carns and coves

from Yew! Magazine 001 - Beyond the Ring and Thimble

by Charles McQuaid

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As Cornish as the carns and coves

Documenting the lives of the Maeckelberghes

There was a time when the name Maeckelberghe was synonymous with Penzance and Cornwall. Margo Maeckelberghe, an artist and Cornish Bard, was a proactive member of the Cornish community. She held membership with the Newlyn Society of Artists, was Chair of the Penwith Society, and was elected a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd. Margo’s husband, Willy Maeckelberghe, worked as a doctor, running a practice in Penzance from the 1960s through to the 90s, played with passion for his local rugby club, and zealously captured daily life in Cornwall as an amateur photographer. The Maeckelberghes spent a lifetime entrenching themselves in and building up their community and their legacy has become as much of a part of the Cornish landscape as the dramatic coastlines, endless moors, and deep blue pools of sea and sky that Margo passionately sought to capture in her paintings.

Sadly, Willy passed away in 2007 and Margo in 2014. They are survived by their two children: Paul, a music producer and Nico, a nurse who are both now retired. What they also left behind was a trove of pictures, slides, paintings and memories. The documents were found by the family after the passing of Margo and Willy and the dissolving of their family home. Michael Eddy and Rory Blair, two local Social Documentary Photographers, got in touch with the family in hopes of shedding light on this unseen material and… The Maeckelberghe Archive was born.

TEXT: CHARLIE MCQUAID ARCHIVISTS: MICHAEL EDDY AND RORY BLAIR

The Maeckelberghe Archive gives an intimate look behind the canvas of Margo and behind the lens of Willy. Collaborating together, Michael Eddy and Rory Blair are working to exhibit Margo’s original artworks along with Willy’s beautifully documented photographs. The project explores the nature of the archive, and ponders the role of photography and the archive in the formation of memories.

It documents the extraordinary lives of Margo and Willy Maeckelberghe, featuring Margo’s works as an expressive Cornish landscape painter and the family’s travels around the world as seen by Willy. It questions what we are able to infer about a person or persons based on the images they make of their family, likely intended solely for themselves diaristically or with the occasional visitor when the slide machine was brought out.

Margo is remembered for her expressive renditions of the picturesque Cornish landscapes that utilise brooding colours and dynamic compositions to depict the county’s coastlines and rolling moorlands. In capturing the drama of the Penwith peninsula her work provided a response to artistic challenges faced by the generation of artists who grew up in the wake of the pioneering modernist figures associated with postwar St Ives and Newlyn. Maeckelberghe found her voice by emphasising her rootedness in the landscape of west Penwith, its weather, its colour, its forms and spaces.

Her works show a deep rootedness in Cornwall, and living in West Penwith gave her paintings a living, breathing understanding of the place. There is something almost unsettling about her paintings - the desolate, expansive and often overwhelming swathes of lands, seas and beaches that seem unable to be contained by the edge of the canvas. They have a forceful and epic quality that manifests in both her choice of subject and their executions, a quality that, at times, approaches the sublime. She drew her inspiration from the starkness of the moors, particularly around the Carn, near Zennor, where one can find some of the most ancient geological rock formations in the British Isles.

Margo’s husband, Willy, was not native to Cornwall but arrived in the United Kingdom during World War Two after his country of birth, Begium, was invaded by Germany. Aged just 12 and with minimal possessions, Willy and his parents undertook the 600 mile journey while a continent was at war. A small fishing boat was the transport of choice to get the family from Ostend to London and relative safety. Willy and his family were now among thousands of refugees that were displaced during the war, he quickly learned English by reading Charles Dickens and studied medicine at St Thomas’s hospital. His passion for rugby brought him down to Penzance where he met and married Margo. In South Parade, Penzance, he worked as a doctor and ran a practice from the 1960s through to the 90s. In his spare time, he played for the local rugby club and captured the family’s travels around the world in the beautiful slides preserved in the archive. It’s here in his photographic eye we are able to see the intimacies of a family growing together. Willy’s artistic side is at odds with his medical practise, the result is a rendering of their adventures from the 1950s through to the 1990s in vivid and intimate detail.

This on-going archival project was launched in celebration of such a unique and creative family who owned a now renowned studio upon Zennor Carne. The beautiful studio-cottage on the ridge of the moors between Penzance and Zennor was the actual and inspirational centre of Margo’s vision, and doubled as the perfect place to raise their children, Nico and Paul.

Simply put, Michael’s and Rory’s curatorial edits combined with Margo’s original paintings might just do justice to the unique lives and works of the Maeckelberghes. Enjoy.