Artist Statement
Meg is a painter whose practice is rooted in drawing. She works primarily in oil and egg tempera, with drawing remaining central to how her work is conceived. Across these materials, she is interested in how image, surface, and thought emerge together through processes of layering, revision, and accumulation. Her work engages with landscape as something constructed rather than directly observed. It draws on fragments of memory, literature, cinema, and the residue of visual experience, where images are not fixed representations but unstable constructions that shift between observation and invention. Her practice also draws on the history of art, particularly its treatment of landscape as an arena for projection and the subconscious. Rather than referencing this history directly, she works through it materially, allowing it to surface through decisions about scale, colour, and the construction of pictorial space. Her paintings emerge from a dialogue between landscape as an encountered place and as a subject constructed within the history of painting.
Meg is particularly drawn to the fragility of paper as a support and how it shapes the behaviour of paint, colour, and surface. Paper is not treated as a neutral ground but as an active material that registers pressure, hesitation, absorption, and correction. This responsiveness becomes integral to the meaning of the work, where image and support cannot be separated. Across oil and egg tempera, her practice is defined by slowness and accretion. The layered surfaces of oil allow for a gradual build-up of light, opacity, and depth, while tempera introduces a more immediate responsiveness. Between these approaches, her work holds a tension between control and instability, structure and dissolution.
Meg was awarded a scholarship to study The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in 2013, and has since taught in various art schools and universities, including the Royal Drawing School. In 2022 she was elected as a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and selected for Flowers Gallery’s long-running Artist of the Day. Her work has been selected for the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize and exhibited at Christie’s in 2024 in an exhibition celebrating the legacy of Picasso. She has been awarded a scholarship from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust to develop her work in etching and to complete an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art.