Marcus Harvey’s painting of Myra Hindley
Marcus Harvey - Myra Hindley: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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Marcus Harvey. Portrait of Myra Hindley (1995).
In Marcus Harvey’s white, grey and black acrylic painting, the units of mark from which the iconic image was constructed were not brushmarks of pigment but a child’s open palm prints. (To be precise, the prints were made with a plaster cast of a child’s hand, not the hand itself.) When viewed from a distance Myra Hindley’s face dominates, but close up the handprints are foregrounded. Handprints are clear examples of indexical signs. They span the history of art, appearing in pre-historic cave paintings and in so-called abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock. They can also be considered iconic in that they resemble the shapes of hands. Thus, small, indexical/iconic signs are used as the building blocks of a second, larger and different iconic sign. This is a rhetorical device well known in the history of art and illustration. Perhaps the most famous examples in European painting are Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits of librarians made from books, or peasants’ heads made from fruits and vegetables.
The handprints can also be considered to be examples of the literary figure synecdoche— a type of sign in which a part stands for the whole (as in a sea captain’s command "All hands on deck"). In this instance the parts are poignant because the small hands stand for the whole of the victims’ bodies. They therefore imply dismemberment. What is crucial, of course, is the meaning which viewers ascribe to the child’s handprints. "Innocence absorbed in all that pain," according to Marcus Harvey. Since Myra Hindley’s face is literally constructed from the handprints of the group from which her victims were selected, the painting surely reiterates the idea that she is inexorably marked by her crime: she can never erase the traces of her and Ian Brady’s victims—their hands reach out from their graves in reproach and accusation. Of course, the association works both ways: the murdered children are inexorably linked to Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and no doubt this is a constant cause of unhappiness for the living relatives of the victims.
Marcus Harvey - Myra Hindley: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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