Meg and I began our conversation introducing to each other what our concentrations at Mason Gross are. Meg’s is painting, and while I explained my experience from doing mostly paintings, drawings and mixed media works to the sometimes restricted environment graphic design can have, Meg responded,
“I don’t ever think I could do a field where I was hemmed in by restrictions.”
Lauren: How are you influenced as a painter?
Meg: I’m also a BA in art history, so I’ve taken classes in East Asian art, Italian Renaissance sculpture, I looked at Gothic architecture, and I know on some level all of that influences my work. I tend to really like Post-Modern work.”
L: Are there particular artists that inspire you?
M: My top three artists are, I really like Anselm Kiefer, I love Louise Bourgeois. Also, theres a really weird Folk artists I like, Clive Barker, the director for Hell Raiser and he does art, but he was never formally trained.”
L: When did you realize that you wanted a career in art?
M: In high school I would design the sets for school plays. When I saw 17 I went to Spain where I saw a lot of cathedrals and work that inspired me.
L: What is your style of painting? What is the process you go through?
M: I have this tendency to imagine the piece in my head, and I exact that plan as close to the image as I can, accommodating for materials or flexibility, because sculpture is a lot about making mistakes and fixing it. Sometime I won’t let the work speak to me. For example, I will show you a piece of mine...”
Meg pulls up an image on her computer of a corner of a room, where an intestine-like tube connecting over the corner one wall to the other. The sculpture is white against black walls.
L: It looks quite large, what are the dimensions and materials you used?
M: I did this piece the fall semester of last year, it was my final for drawing 1A. It’s about twelve feet high and four feet wide. I had to have a giant stack of drawing horses just to climb high enough. Basically I’ve been working to refine this kind of aesthetic I really like. It’s one inch copper wiring, chicken wire, and instead of using paper mache, it’s strips of bedsheets dipped in plaster, latex paint and toilet paper. And it (the tube) open to expose the process in which I made it. I had it spewing out it’s internal guts.
L: Why did you choose to have it black and white?
M: I was originally going to paint it all black and have red coming out of it. My teacher said, ‘Meg, no don’t do that. You need to see how you feel when you’re making the piece, don’t hide the process, you wouldn’t be able to see the inside if it was black.’ I think this is one of the more successful piece I’ve done because I didn’t really plan it out exactly when I started it.”
L: How long did it take to complete?
M: Two weeks. I pulled multiple all nighters.
L: Was there a purpose to this piece?
M: The subject was Wiki Leaks, because right at that time...
L: Everything was being leaked?
M: Yeah, and it was interesting because personally I have a lot of friends who are in the army. It’s the idea that where does one draw the line between having information and threatening people’s live by revealing that information? It’s kind of like privacy versus freedom. I was thinking of that type of subject and I don’t know how well I conveyed that was my goal. I had that goal in the beginning, I didn’t bullshit it at the end.
L: The two works you’ve showed me so far are sculptures that seem to have been technical, would you say you like craftsmanship and building more than painting on a canvas?
M: I’m very much about immersing myself in my paintings. I love to get dirty with my work, and I have to be careful because I often you materials that are slightly dangerous!
L: Hah, I’m like a...hypochondriac, germaphobe. In painting I would hate to even touch the solvent.
M: Oh, no I get that like, all over me. Doing the plaster was fantastic. I feel like it’s more bonding. I put more of myself into the work, I become more emotionally invested in the pieces by interacting with the materials and feeling the materials.
Meg shows me some of her favorite artists online, and comparing her work to theirs she says, “My work definitely reflects these kinds of dramatic, theatrical kind of work.I like these darker subjects matters, theatrical interpretations usually in the three-dimensional context.”
L: Do you have any longterm goals for your work?
M: One of my goals is to interject personal feelings into my work. To have some kind of personal affiliation with my work.
L: I try not to let my work get to personal, so do you do the same?
M: I’m very much the same. I’m a very private person. But I don’t want to do that because a lot of the artists I admire are more expressionist rather than formalist.
But, my work definitely reflects these kinds of dramatic, theatrical kind of work. I like these darker subjects matters, theatrical interpretations usually in the three-dimensional context.
L: Do you have more work I can see?
M: Unfortunately, I don’t have that many records of my work.
L: So you have these installations that you put up, and when you take them down and what do you do with them? Do you keep them together or destroy them? Does that make you feel sad?
M: No I think they gain something precious by being temporal. A lot of artists get emotionally attached to their work and then they could never sell it. I don’t have that problem. It might be that I’m not sentimental about my work but at the same time I always give my larger sculpture pieces names that my children might have.
L: So even giving them names as you would a child doesn’t make it hard to give away?
M: No.
I’m laughing, “jeez, what kind of mother would you be?” I say
Meg is laughing too, she says, “the destruction of them can be part of the work to. You’ve created it, recorded the process in which you made it, you have the final product and you record it’s destruction. It’s come full circle. It’s so liberating to destroy work.”
L: What are your plans after graduating?
M: Ideally I’d like to be an artists assistant. I’d like to do grunge work, mix paint, cut canvases, make stretcher bars. I will also work as an intern at a museum. Hopefully it will come to a point where I can work in a museum and rise my way up. I want to become a professional artist but I love museums so I’ll have to make the decision if I want to enter the museum circuit or go on for my MFA. I’m a better person when I’m making work. I should be painting
Closing remarks: I didn’t know Meg at all before our interview. I feel like I learned a lot about her from understanding her art and the aspects of it we discussed. It was really interesting to me that she has few, if any records of her work because her the whole experience of creating and destroying a piece is what makes up her art.
