A Glamour of Meaning

Meaghan Shelton Artist Statement,
A Glamour of Meaning   

At a time when the allure of artificial intelligence increasingly captivates, transdisciplinary artist Meaghan Shelton reclaims the term ‘glamour’ in its original sense, a form of magic: a charm that altered perception not merely as visual seduction, but as an enchantment or spell. Meaghan’s material provocations uncannily present the ordinary as extraordinary, tracing symbolic links between craft, memory, ecology, and feminine agency. Her practice contributes to new conversations at the intersection of creative practice, feminist thinking, and contemporary visual culture. In redressing traditional connections and inner landscapes of the feminine, she untangles historical conflations of women and their sense of self as cultural 'others'. Working at the fine art/craft nexus, across painting, sculpture, and textiles, Meaghan also seeks to activate women’s agency and provide opportunities for individual and generational healing.

Where a pomegranate tree grew on the boundary of Meaghan’s grandparents’, she observed seasonal effects on the tree as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of her Nana’s and her matriarch neighbour’s friendship.  Its fruit was her earliest childhood memory of something tangibly mysterious. The garden, combined with learning to crochet whilst sitting at her Nana’s feet by the fire, intermingled with a Victorian sensibility and vestiges of her Grandfather’s brother— photographer Stan Moriarty’s artefacts collected from his many visits to New Guinea. The simple crochet hook and thread, or yarn, was easily transportable to Australia during colonisation, providing a connection to matrilineal familial knowledges. Yet these are only a small representation of the motifs that speak to the dialogic of both the artist’s early perception and her ongoing research into coloniality’s obsession with the exotic and, consequently, its troublesome entanglements.

The pomegranate, or Eve’s apple, as it was known in ancient times, has become talismanic in this work, filling the negative spaces and gaps that make up crochet’s patterns. Jewel-like arils replace the voids, the seeds representing women’s stories that have otherwise been omitted, left out and ignored in art historical narratives. The work exposes historically marginalised female experiences by reimagining these inequalities in an effort to make them visible. Drawing threads of the familial across time to reference traditional representations of women, Meaghan seeks to convey women’s knowledge as it is embedded and embodied in domestic craft.

In this exhibition, the glamour cast by craft and painting is precisely this revivifying act — one that invites reconsideration of the decorative, of what lies beneath, and making as knowing.