Christina Margaretha
Photographerher
Christina Margaretha is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intimate terrain of womanhood, motherhood, and transformation. Working in the forests and grasslands near her home in southern Ontario, Canada, she creates site-responsive works that merge portraiture, textiles, and the landscape – centering the body in relationship with land, lineage, and time. She frequently collaborates with her daughter, weaving lived experience into visual narratives of healing and renewal across generations.
Originally trained as a landscape painter, Margaretha’s transition to motherhood sparked a profound shift in her practice, leading her to embrace photography and weaving as pathways to deeper embodiment and reflection. Through the recurring presence of red yarn, she evokes themes of connection, care, and ancestral memory in both material and metaphor.
Formally trained in Fine Arts at York University, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent highlights including a solo exhibition at Thus Gallery (Toronto) and a six-woman show at the Aurora Cultural Centre. Last fall, she completed her second photography residency at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on the Toronto Islands.
“My art begins with questions I carry in my body – about womanhood, lineage, and the stories we’re taught to believe. Raised in a strict religious tradition, I absorbed patriarchal beliefs that diminished the female body, silenced inner knowing, and severed the sacred from the feminine. Motherhood brought those messages into sharper focus, and I became determined to disrupt this harmful legacy.
Working with photography, video, and textiles, I create staged performances in natural landscapes that reflect a personal journey of healing and reclamation. I look to nature not only as a collaborator but as a guide, its cycles of growth, decay, and renewal echoing my own. Nature’s dynamic intelligence helps me unearth parts of myself buried under inherited shame, offering a more grounded and sacred understanding of the body.
Much of my work explores the mother-daughter relationship as the first place we learn what it means to be a woman, and as a space where those meanings can be questioned and reimagined. Collaborating with my daughter allows me to give form to these ideas. Her presence in the work helps me embody the questions I’m asking: How do we unlearn inherited wounding? How do we create new rituals of care and connection?
Backstrap weaving with red yarn is central to my practice. With this technique, my body becomes part of the loom, echoing the rhythms of nature – tension and release, unraveling and repair. The yarn and woven elements appear throughout my work as tactile traces of transformation, linking land, lineage, and memory in quiet rituals of resistance and becoming.”