Marcus Harvey, Myra

Marcus Harvey, Myra, painting, 1995. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Marcus Harvey’s Myra appeared in the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997, public reaction was instant and explosive. The painting, a monumental portrait of the convicted child murderer Myra Hindley, was composed entirely of children’s handprints. Before the show even opened, it had been vandalised twice; windows at the Royal Academy were smashed and the work was later pelted with eggs and ink. Security guards were stationed beside it, and it was displayed behind Perspex to prevent further attacks.

While many of the Sensation artists courted the controversy, Harvey withdrew from public view. The work itself was made by pressing casts of infant hands in black, grey, and white paint to recreate Hindley’s infamous police mugshot. The use of innocent children’s handprints against the image of Britain’s most reviled criminal created an immediate, almost unbearable tension, the collision of purity and corruption. Originally sold for £11,000, Myra later changed hands for nearly £100,000 and now belongs to Damien Hirst.

The painting received intense press attention even before the exhibition opened. The Royal Academy’s Secretary defended its inclusion, describing its effect as “cathartic”, but four Academicians resigned in protest. The institution was accused of exploiting the pain of the Moors murder victims’ families, and Winnie Johnson, the mother of one of the children, pleaded for the painting’s removal. Even Hindley herself, writing from prison, condemned its display as showing “a sole disregard not only for the emotional pain and trauma that would inevitably be experienced by the families of the Moors victims but also the families of any child victim.”

Despite the outrage, the work remained on display, and the Royal Academy saw high visitor numbers. Harvey’s intention was never to glorify Hindley but to confront the collective image of evil itself. By reconstructing the most reproduced criminal photograph in Britain from the traces of innocence, he turned the media’s obsession with moral panic back on itself. The horror of Myra lies not in Hindley’s face but in our familiarity with it.

The scandal revealed something deeply British: a culture both repelled and fascinated by its own tabloid mythology. Myra became a mirror for national guilt, grief, and voyeurism. Harvey’s brush never touched the canvas; the thousands of small handprints did the seeing for him. It was a collaboration between innocence and monstrosity, and a chilling meditation on how images can both condemn and consume.

Today, Myra still unsettles. It asks whether art that wounds is necessarily unethical, or whether confronting horror might be a necessary act of looking. The outrage it provoked proved Harvey’s point: we cannot separate moral condemnation from visual fascination.