Emotional identities and intimate awareness are things that fascinate me. Although these conditions cannot be clearly defined, I enjoy the struggle of attempting to examine them or create new questions asking what we think we know about ourselves.
My goal is to question these complicated qualities of closeness through actions, video, metaphor, or object. I expose constructs of identity in the singular self and within the plural unit of a relationship.
Through the reverse engineering of my own memory and experience, I attempt to understand relationships, love, time, vulnerability, and closeness. I do this by becoming transfixed upon my own memories of growing up and discovering the intense ups and downs of emotional vulnerability and honing in on an aspect of it that I can’t shake. I am searching for answers about qualities of relationships and what these qualities do for us after a long personal history of failed and abusive past relationships.
I see myself collecting both the positive and negative qualities to use as tools for interpretation in regard to the work. This work is then emerged through the material or the concept of the piece at hand.
These drawings and marks created are not erased nor are they perfected, but are instead they are allowed to exist in their most earnest and imperfect state. This same existence of earnestness in regard to the material is how I feel when reaching back into my own mind for memory of who I am and what I remember about myself at different points in time. The watercolor acts as an atmosphere of memory and a fluid state of searching while the drawings anchor themselves as the people that have shaped my existence and understanding of my own identity.
I make artwork when it is emotionally easy and when it is emotionally muddy and complicated because it is all relevant. I think of the artwork as poetic and scientific gestures to offer up to myself as an opportunity to reflect on my own personal narrative of emotional vulnerability.
Our intimate failures and successes bleed into our memories in very unique and lasting ways.
Emotional vulnerability involves a group dynamic- at least a group of two. The closest people we hold on to have the potential to build us or to diminish us.
Find out more about Megan’s work: www.meganstclair.com