This year I’ve presented several workshops on art writing and I always start with The Wounded Deer (1946). I open up PowerPoint and there she is. Frida Kahlo’s head painted on the body of a young stag running through the forest, as nimbly as it can on those tiny, delicate […]
Art Writing
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I woke up the other morning, started scrolling my phone, and landed on an image of a gigantic Blue Ted roaming the flaxen countryside. Blue Ted had an enormous head and a rotund belly, but from his bright blue furry arms protruded human hands and from his blue furry legs […]
‘I thought I could work on my anger’, I said. I sat on the red couch and looked at my therapist earnestly. He is a kind, thin, graceful man who does tai chi. His pale-blue eyes twinkled like Santa Claus’s. ‘I also have a lot of creative blocks’, I said. […]
I can see why they didn’t put it in the show. It’s not made from our moment. It’s not a #metoo-era masterpiece. Quite the opposite, in fact. But there are no facts, only a lithograph called The Felled Trunk by J.H. Moesman that I can’t unsee. He made it in […]
What’s art got to do with it? is the loose title —thanks Tina Turner—that I cribbed for my occasional art segment on RNZ’s Saturday morning show with Kim Hill. I discuss the intersection of art and life, hoping to look at art beyond gallery walls when possible. The kinky and […]
This is the talk I gave for Speakers Corner: Art for Art’s Sake at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2022. Today I am going to tell you about: a picklea piece of paperand a hinge. But first I am going to tell you about nothing. I once gave an old […]
The pencil was on loan from Waitakere College. It wasn’t until I was tapping the model’s redhead with it—as though she was an egg I might crack—that I felt things were working. The pencil became the irritant. As writing is often an irritant for me. Each point bearing down on […]
Another art writer once said to me: no one wants to be an art writer Megan. I laughed because for me it was true. Art writing has been an accidental vocation. I attended Elam School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1998 when I was in my early twenties. When […]
The Spinoff, March 21, 2019 On a Sunday afternoon I opened my laptop and sat in In Transit, the most ambitious and nimble exhibition on in the country right now. If the Doozers from Fraggle Rock got unlimited access to stainless steel pipes and a really good welder they might have made the current installation at […]
New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press). ___ Are these dancers holy fools and if so what does that make us? Francis Upritchard first exhibited Dancers as part of her pavilion, Save Yourself, at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Three tables of handmade figures, including Dancers, were presented in […]
New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press). ___ Does this artwork deserve to be called a ‘wanker’? Well, it is nothing if not colourful. Four rows of crosses shake and shudder within their lattice boxes. The oil paint has a slapdash appeal, each stroke thick and lustrous as though it […]
Wellington Sculpture Trust, Four Plinths catalogue, 2018 ____ I’m on top of the world, the seagull thought. Beak turned toward the ocean, flanked by the museum, the seagull had little cause to wonder but which world? 2. The globes were running a bit behind, Ruth Watson told me over Skype. […]