It began simply enough. Margaret’s aunties looked at her from their old photographs. These aunties, Marie and Alice were Catholic nuns, of different orders, women among the last of their kind.

Margaret looked back and came to wonder about their lives, about who they were within and beyond their veils. She decided to honour the family place of these intelligent, resilient, funny women by painting a portrait of each.
But portraiture is not neutral. It’s both personal and political. Decisions needed to be made about how to appropriately portray them and their extraordinary lives. Margaret’s thinking led to significant research and musing – about family history, about growing up Catholic. She developed relationships with the archivists of each order, spoke with nuns who told treasured stories about them, and researched the orders her aunties had joined.

She rediscovered family secrets, stories and her own childhood memories and questioning about what it meant to grow up Catholic. As she painted, she wrote, stitching their stories together with her own. After ten years of work this exhibition and book celebrate their lives and her questions.