ARTIST STATEMENT
My sculptures explore embodied healing in order to reckon with and transform harmful ways of being and to help people experience freedom and aliveness. Weaving together many frameworks, including white anti-racism, healing justice, ecofeminism, environmental justice, meditative arts, visionary sci fi, southern gothic and Southern-rooted liberation movements, my work dissembles and re-imagines symbolic vocabulary from our bodies and surrounding environment, creating space for new possibilities around how we can relate to ourselves, to one another and to the more-than-human life around us. I create familiar yet unknown amalgamations to reveal the dialogue between seemingly disconnected realms and remind us of the tools we already possess.
Spiny areolas sprout from dermal and geological folds; stalagmites reach through glistening entrails; marine-like creatures pulse through watery environments. My sculptures are richly hued biomorphic forms that are playful yet unsettling, beautiful yet grotesque—evoking organs, bodily cavities, terrestrial formations, and verdant landscapes. Their reaching appendages and bulbous protrusions elicit wonder and discomfort, prompting reflection on our intimate relationships with the ecosystems we inhabit and embody.
This inventive vocabulary of possibility is presented within a social practice context that invites exploration of our internal relationships in order to see the impact those ways of being have on the surrounding ecosystem. Existing as locations of possibility that activate viewers’ embodied experiences, this work invites audiences into a process of revealing, reckoning and shifting that awakens each individual’s natural ability to exist as a simultaneously singular and collective site of transformation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Meg Stein (she/they) is a visual artist living and working in Durham, NC, primarily working in sculpture and social practice. She has exhibited at VICTORI + MO, Garis & Hahn, the Nasher Museum of Art, A.I.R. Gallery, Westbeth Gallery, VA MOCA, Vox Populi, and the Spartanburg Museum of Art, among others. She’s been an artist- in-residence at Yaddo, Millay Arts, The Hambidge Center, among others. Meg has been awarded a Puffin Grant, the Garland Fellowship, the Ella Pratt Emerging Artist Grant and was selected as the North Carolina Fellow for South Arts. In 2014, she received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 2016, she has founded social practice projects in both her solo work and as a member of Art Ain’t Innocent, a Durham-based multi-racial, cross-class Southern arts visioning collective.
Her social practice project Dirty White Matter invited community into discussion and artistic practices around whiteness and femininity and was featured in a Citizen catalogue from St. John’s University in conjunction with Claudia Rankine’s work. She’s been the lead artist or co-lead artist on several large-scale public art and social practice projects, including the Downtown Durham Mural Project, creation of the “Eat Art” short film, and the Durham Art Parade. In addition to her work as a visual artist, she is an embodied mindfulness guide and teacher at Alive and Aware Practice, where she shares practices that also inform her artistic work. You can learn more about her work at megstein.com.
© Megan K Stein