Nestled within the edges of the rolling hills in Meg Gallagher’s paintings is indelible calm. It’s apt, an imprint upon the work born from the simple fact that art-making is when the artist feels most calm. Moving from the south coast of Sydney, Gallagher has found creative freedom in her current home in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa in New Zealand. It’s a place of serene escape, important because place is the reference for her creative process.
“I’m best in the mornings,” she explains, drinking up the quiet beauty of the world and storing it in her mind. “I’m lucky to be surrounded by so many incredible landscapes and coastlines.”
Drawing from her experience in the fashion industry, each artwork begins with the use of heavy cotton denim as a base. “It’s a material I used for many years as a denim designer,” she recalls. The marriage between these off-cut textiles and colour continues as paint is layered onto the canvas.
Following an intuitive process, Gallagher employs the use of a range of pigments, dyes and thick acrylics to emulate the tones and textures she observes in the landscape around her. Each colour blends with the next, forming layers of soft lines that appear to move with nature’s languid fluidity.
Her paintings are bleary, comfortable opacities, the sort one might expect to see while half-awake, still curled beneath warm sheets: beautiful, framed within the borders of a window at the foot of one’s bed, far away but calling for them to look closer. It is these details in Gallagher’s paintings that beckon. They bear sensory counterparts; Fresh Start kisses coolness across viewers’ skin; there is the whisper of a breeze over sweltering earth in Hot Sand; and as Introspection’s name suggests, we are invited to peer through the mist and reflect. The work conjures the sweetness of petrichor.
