The artist as crime scene investigator: Carolyn Curtis Magri’s forensic drawings

Natalie Bradbury

Writer Natalie Bradbury speaks with artist Carolyn Curtis Magri about the inspiration behind her intricately worked, embossed and layered drawings as a new survey exhibition, 60 Drawings + 10, featuring the work of 70 artists and curated by Curtis Magri, opens at the Whitaker in Rossendale.

When I arrive in the picturesque town of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire to interview the artist Carolyn Curtis Magri, she meets me at the railway station for the short walk to her studio. En route, Curtis Magri mentions that the cast and crew of Happy Valley are in town, filming another series of the popular crime drama set in the Calder Valley. There couldn’t be a more appropriate introduction to our first meeting. Curtis Magri is not just an avid and long-term consumer of crime fiction, but her artistic practice is rooted in a deep fascination with crime and draws on forensic approaches to investigating places and events.

On the day I visit, Curtis Magri’s studio is flooded with sunshine, which seems highly incongruous for an artist whose work is preoccupied with death, disease and decay. High up in a former mill building, the large windows of her studio look over cobbled streets and sloping rows of rooftops towards the steep, wooded sides of the valley in which the town sits. Views like these attract scores of artists and visitors to the area. Whereas other local artists do a good trade in conventional landscape paintings of Yorkshire, though, Curtis Magri’s work offers a different perspective on her surroundings, delving into the hidden and less dwelt-upon stories of the places around her.

Curtis Magri explains to me that she “pays attention to the things people aren’t looking at.” Gesturing to a series of drawings, while leafing through files of detailed research notes and local newspaper cuttings, she points out some of the darker histories of the Calder Valley. Buried within layers of graphite, lead and wax, the viewer might see, for example, a concealed weapon, veiled references to the paedophilic entertainer Jimmy Savile (who regularly stayed in a caravan in the area), or shadowy features resembling the teenager Lindsay Jo Rimer, whose body was found in the Rochdale Canal in 1994 and whose killer was never found.

This interest in crime reflects the fourteen years Curtis Magri spent teaching in prisons. For many prisoners, the art room provided an environment where they would open up about certain topics. “It’s a relaxed atmosphere, so you overhear all sorts of conversations and arguments about forensics and science,” she tells me. This work also gave her a sense of objectivity and helped her develop the “very strong shell” which she says is required of somebody who spends their time immersed in crime.

Curtis Magri’s studio is filled with large drawings on thick paper specially sourced from Barcelona, which she has hung from the walls and spread out on a large table in the centre of the room. Looking around, I often feel like a detached observer gazing down at a scene from a great height. Many of Curtis Magri’s drawings resemble landscapes as seen from above. Embossing sightlines and grid patterns onto the surface of the paper, Curtis Magri orders and segments her compositions as if cordoning off an area in readiness for a methodological, inch by inch inspection.

The drawings themselves are treated like a crime scene. Using a technique similar to forensic taping, Curtis Magri applies micropore tape to the paper, which adheres to the surface. When removed, it takes a layer of the drawing with it and thereby creates a record of the materials she has used. Curtis Magri may then go on to apply this tape to other drawings, in the process transferring traces of her previous work. Reminiscent of DNA left at a crime scene and used to retrospectively situate a person in a particular place at a certain time, these small physical remnants of the artist’s mark-making create an invisible link between seemingly disconnected pieces in a bigger body of work.

What’s striking about Curtis Magri’s drawings is not just the fastidiousness with which she approaches her subjects and materials, but the way in which she switches between different scales of enquiry. A particular piece may present an overview of a place or situation, as seen from afar, at the same time as incorporating areas of almost microscopic detail, which ask the viewer to look closely at her drawings and take in the artist’s findings, as closely observed in pencil.

These perspectives are informed in part by a residency Curtis Magri undertook with the forensics department at the University of Central Lancashire in order to develop her knowledge of what has to be done to preserve a site and collect evidence. During her time at the university, Curtis Magri visited a site near Burnley containing buried pigs (for ethical reasons, students and researchers are unable to work with human remains), as well as spending time with a former crime scene investigator who was researching the use of drone technology to detect hidden bodies.

Curtis Magri is also interested in the international art and research collective Forensic Architecture, whose work she encountered in the library at the Wellcome Collection in London. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, Forensic Architecture blur the boundaries between art, science and geopolitics. They use technologies such as heat mapping to investigate the aftermath of events that may otherwise pass unscrutinised, and to critique and hold to account systems of power.

Today, Curtis Magri is showing me some of her recent investigations, which concern a historic case in the former mill town of Rawtenstall, just over the border in Pennine Lancashire. One corner of Curtis Magri’s studio is dedicated to this research, which was prompted by an exhibition she is co-ordinating at the town’s Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery this summer, called 60 Drawings + 10, which will bring together the work of seventy artists.

In creating new drawings for the exhibition, Curtis Magri turned to the museum’s archive for inspiration. Her interest was piqued by the first recorded murder in Rawtenstall, which took place in 1948, and was committed by a transgender man (Curtis Magri tells me that some contemporary articles described them as a man, and some as a woman).

Although she has found that there is frustratingly little information on the murder, Curtis Magri recounts the story as she understands it. A resident named Margaret Allen, who lived and dressed as a man, had a wealthy but mean neighbour called Nancy Ellen Chadwick. Every week, she would knock on Allen’s door. One day, Allen snapped and beat her to death. Allen was sent to Strangeways (the prison in which Curtis Magri worked most recently, prior to the pandemic) and eventually hung.

For Curtis Magri, the challenge is not just the lack of information about the event, but how to appropriately represent and discuss the actions of a person whose life and experiences were so different to her own, and which were intertwined with a particular social and moral context.

“I’ve been trying to find out how she would have been treated then,” Curtis Magri tells me. “She looks quite fierce, but it must have been hard as the town was quite religious at that time. She dressed as a man and went out to work and didn’t hide what she was doing.”

As part of her preparatory sketches and explorations, Curtis Magri has been using an iPhone app called Snapseed to layer images, resulting in a portrayal of Allen that is implied rather than explicit. The images combine Allen’s solemn features, taken from a black and white photograph, with elements of the town’s industrial heritage. This includes geographical features, such as an outline map of the area and a mill chimney that would have once been a dominant sight on the town’s skyline. Other imagery relates to the workings and machinery of the textile industry, for example point papers which were designed to programme textile patterns for a Jacquard loom, spindles photographed from the Whitaker collection, and a close-up of a cotton weave.

The cotton industry has all but disappeared from Rawtenstall, yet it played an important part in the foundation of the Whitaker. The gallery and museum is based in a house which was built for a mill owner and later donated to the town by a subsequent resident, the industrialist Richard Whitaker. Although industrialists frequently used their wealth to make highly visible philanthropic gestures such as the provision of public facilities like these for mill towns, Curtis Magri highlights the less benevolent histories and practices of the textile industry. Overworked with wax-based pencils using a palette suggestive of bruising and bodily harm, her drawings acknowledge the exploitation and poor treatment of workers on which industry was built. Depicted in faint and delicate detail, a lung disintegrates as it is eaten away by a disease known as Byssinosis, caused by cotton dust and common in textile workers. Winged children look on, in reference to conflicting attitudes towards children; Curtis Magri observes that children were often depicted as angels in the artworks of the industrial era, which was at odds with their use as child labour.

The overall effect is of a ghostly composite portrait of people, times and places that no longer exist except in archives and local memory. We may never be able to fully understand the past, but Curtis Magri suggests a role for the artist in helping the viewer to imagine – and thereby go some way towards understanding – places and historic events, whether real, imagined or somewhere in between. In a similar way to crime fiction, which brings our attention to key pieces of evidence as it unfolds on the page or on the screen, Curtis Magri sifts through the available information, finds patterns, interprets and reinterprets what she sees, and points out complexities and contradictions. In doing so, she helps the viewer to build up a picture and come to a conclusion about what happened. Curtis Magri’s drawings demonstrate how art can be inspired by scientific techniques, and show that there is room for poetic licence when exploring the past and what took place there.

60 Drawings + 10 opens at the Whitaker, Rossendale at 7pm on Thursday 16 June and continues until Sunday 11 August. Events will take place alongside the exhibition, including performances by Kevin Dalton Johnson and Nicola Dale on 16 June and a question and answer panel with participating artists on Thursday 14 July (7pm-8.30pm). For more information see the Whitaker website:

www.thewhitaker.org