Margaret is known as a consummate singer of traditional song, director of the Folk Village Museum and people gatherer in Glencolmcille. The valley takes its name from the early Irish saint, Colmcille who was born in Donegal in either AD 520 or 521 and died in Iona on the 9th June AD 593. In her intricately woven tapestries, Margaret draws on the landscape around her and the stories it holds, with compelling imagery, both pictorial and abstract, her work evokes a deeply atmospheric sense of this place, with craggy cliffs, lilling sea, purple heather and ancient standing stones.

Representing the age-old skills of wool production (shearing, spinning and naturally dyeing yarn) as a vital form of artistic expression today, threads of Margarets many talents in draughtsmanship and song weave together to form impressionistic and vibrant tapestries. In contextualising her process, Margaret describes the importance of preserving skills and techniques that have been handed down through families in local the community, ‘many aspects of our cultural heritage have been lost with the passing of just one generation’.

Margaret’s tapestries carry forward embodied forms of knowledge to create a vernacular expression that is both historical and contemporary, and so she preserves the tradition in this area with its early medieval and Neolithic heritage.