Magill grew up in Northern Ireland but lives and works in London. She began exhibiting in the mid-1980s. She is a painter of prodigious versatility and inventiveness whose work has always drawn from a wide range of visual sources. While she has often integrated photographic materials and processes into her painting, in a number of novel ways, and has recently made an excursion into video, her primary fidelity has been to the medium of painting, in all its bewildering variety. Over the past few years her typically idiosyncratic revisioning of the tradition of the romantic sublime has resulted in a series of hauntingly distressed paintings of the landscape. Her first major solo exhibition was at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in 1990. In the same year she was included in the seminal 'British Art Show', which first introduced many of the most prominent younger British artists to a wider public.