Megan Davies

Artist Statement

Megan’s practice explores the relationship between material and memory; re-imagining sections of fabric taken from an archive of her own childhood photographs to create tangible connections to the past. Her work uses texture and delicacy in mark-making to convey these recollections in a state of flux. By rebuilding the painting’s surface through a fragile, patchwork canvas and fading representations of textiles, the fragmentation and temporality of memory is physically constructed, or reconstructed.

This body of work, titled Material Re-collection, interweaves textiles with painting and multimedia objects to question the spaces and surfaces in which this recollection takes place. The physical sites in which memories occur are not linear. By deconstructing the material role of the home’s embodied familial history, we can understand how our relationship to textiles can transform. Materials act as tactile collections, reminding us of the past, remaining as traces of our relationships. Megan constructs a transitional space between remembrance and forgetting; within which these memories are given agency, allowed to drift, to sit and to cause murmurs of other recollections. Her use of various mediums recreates familial and textural works that linger with both the presence and absence of human connection.