Margaret Watkins: Feeling through the Archive

Presentation Type

Event

Start Date

8-3-2026 6:14 PM

Description

Towards the end of her life, Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins began revising and annotating her personal documents, leaving behind short notes and quips throughout the materials. This paper explores the artist’s residual presence in the archive and how, from within the materials, Watkins voices her subjective thoughts, connecting the past and the present in the archive’s liminal space. Through Margaret Watkins’s annotations, her private archive becomes a public space: a space of agency and self-determination where the artist guides and dictates the way others interpret her life, her accomplishments, and her sense of self. While exploring Margaret Watkins’s archive in a non-linear approach, this paper raises the following research questions: following the work of Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, what does it mean to annotate one’s own archive? What can an artist’s archival practices disclose about their approach to artistic expression and reflection? What kind of affective resonances come through the material possessions collected by artists? And finally, how does the archive affect the viewer/researcher and how is this experience a product of the artist’s own subjectivity? To understand Margaret Watkins’s turn to the archive, I refer to Listening to Images by Tina Campt who illuminates that photographs and archives should be approached in an exploratory manner, based on the senses and using affective and haptic realms to uncover realities otherwise silenced. According to Ernst van Alphen, Jacques Derrida’s archival drive – or the impulse to record, organize, collect and consign knowledge – intersects with photography’s fundamental ability to record and index reality. Finally, this paper serves as a case-study for the relationship between the photographer, the archive, and the viewer/researcher, while considering the photographic practice of a lesser known female photographer.

Charlotte Beyries is an emerging researcher and museum professional, recently graduated from the Art History and Visual Culture Master’s program at York University in Toronto. Her master’s research focused on Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins and the interactions between artists and their archives. Her research experience includes a wide range of topics related to historical and contemporary photography and Canadian art, rooted in archival and feminist perspectives. She currently holds a Thomson Canadian Art Junior Fellowship at the Art Gallery of Ontario and has previously worked in collections management at the Agnes Etherington Art Center in Kingston, Ontario, and at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Quebec.

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Mar 8th, 6:14 PM

Margaret Watkins: Feeling through the Archive

Towards the end of her life, Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins began revising and annotating her personal documents, leaving behind short notes and quips throughout the materials. This paper explores the artist’s residual presence in the archive and how, from within the materials, Watkins voices her subjective thoughts, connecting the past and the present in the archive’s liminal space. Through Margaret Watkins’s annotations, her private archive becomes a public space: a space of agency and self-determination where the artist guides and dictates the way others interpret her life, her accomplishments, and her sense of self. While exploring Margaret Watkins’s archive in a non-linear approach, this paper raises the following research questions: following the work of Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, what does it mean to annotate one’s own archive? What can an artist’s archival practices disclose about their approach to artistic expression and reflection? What kind of affective resonances come through the material possessions collected by artists? And finally, how does the archive affect the viewer/researcher and how is this experience a product of the artist’s own subjectivity? To understand Margaret Watkins’s turn to the archive, I refer to Listening to Images by Tina Campt who illuminates that photographs and archives should be approached in an exploratory manner, based on the senses and using affective and haptic realms to uncover realities otherwise silenced. According to Ernst van Alphen, Jacques Derrida’s archival drive – or the impulse to record, organize, collect and consign knowledge – intersects with photography’s fundamental ability to record and index reality. Finally, this paper serves as a case-study for the relationship between the photographer, the archive, and the viewer/researcher, while considering the photographic practice of a lesser known female photographer.

Charlotte Beyries is an emerging researcher and museum professional, recently graduated from the Art History and Visual Culture Master’s program at York University in Toronto. Her master’s research focused on Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins and the interactions between artists and their archives. Her research experience includes a wide range of topics related to historical and contemporary photography and Canadian art, rooted in archival and feminist perspectives. She currently holds a Thomson Canadian Art Junior Fellowship at the Art Gallery of Ontario and has previously worked in collections management at the Agnes Etherington Art Center in Kingston, Ontario, and at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Quebec.