Margaret Cogswell

My drawings are the result of “seeing things” – through months of walking, exploring, photographing and filming the landscape of an area I am researching for the development of each of my River Fugues projects.  Much like an archaeologist or geologist, I may search for clues to the history of a river, a people, or a place in the enigmatic remnants of their past.  While researching Red Hook Harbor Soundings, I became intrigued with the fragmented remains of infrastructure and industry emerging from the Red Hook harbor where the tidal waters of both the Hudson and East Rivers alternately reveal and then conceal the histories of these ruins.  Similarly, walks along the Ashokan Reservoir evoke wonderings of the submerged towns, their memories now held silently in the surrounding mountains.  Hikes through desert landscapes in The Great Basin of Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming, wanderings along the Cao Gong River in the ancient water town of Zhujiajiao, China, and hushed ventures through abandoned steel mills in Cleveland all led to drawings which are often acknowledging loss, paying homage to the defiant traces of a people, their lives embedded in a place - in a landscape – literally, metaphorically, or metaphysically. 

“Karasu to Issyoni Kaerimasyo / The River of Memories”

Studies for site-specific installation at Nokogirini- summer 2024 

These mixed-media collages were experimental 2-D studies for what became the site-specific installation at Nokogirini which included these same materials and more.