Megan Merchant
MY THERAPIST SAID TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR MONSTERS
8x10 Mixed Media on Bristol Board IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is an abstract painting done mostly in yellow, teal, and pale gray with red and black highlights and on a white background. The painted shapes suggest two figures. One has a large, yellow head with highlights for facial features and a fading gray body. The other is gray with a few highlights and the suggestion of a face in its torso.
“MEANWHILE, IN MY HEAD, I’M UNDERGOING OPEN HEART SURGERY” —ANNE SEXTON
Mixed Media, 9x11 wood panel. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A woman sits smoking beneath the moon. The image is drawn in dark blue, with splashes of other colors, on a light gray background. The woman is naked and sits with her knees drawn up to her chest and her back to the camera. Colored patches dot her back while her hair is filled in with dark blue. The blanket, world map, or universe she sits on is also filled-in with dark blue and patches of color. A trail of colored smoke extends upward from her cigarette or joint to surround the moon. The moon is full and dark blue.
Artist statement: As an artist, I have a tendency to start conversations with a vulnerable “here’s the wound” kind of approach. One that doesn’t waste time in the shallows. I have collected, along the way, experience, lines, moments, and memories that store themselves in my body with ache and insistence. But my body is only a temporary container, housing them until they are understood and formed enough to take shape as either an idea, an image, a line, a paint stroke, or a knife cut. Each piece is a way of shaping how I have translated this lived experience—the said and unsaid, touch, fear, joy, grief, so that it can communicate and hopefully connect.
Lately, I have been working with cutting into or sanding down collaged layers in a way that I never know what will be exposed, shine through, or formed. In this way, the image reveals itself and becomes a conversation with both embodied story and something beautifully unexpected.