Meghan Stanley

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I create new bodies and organs as extensions of my own, carrying memories that are both personal and inherited. I think about the body as an archive, holding traces of my mother, her mother, and the generations of women before them. Girlhood is part of this inheritance. The ways we learn femininity, the objects we associate with it, and the ways we come to understand our bodies are carried forward, even as the body itself changes. The female body is constantly producing and changing. It bleeds, contracts, expands, and generates. There is no fixed boundary between inside and outside. With sculpture, internal structures and fluids become visible. Organs are shifted, combined, and re-formed into new configurations that distort familiar anatomy. Skin becomes malleable rather than acting as a barrier, allowing what is internal to move outward. I work through abjection by focusing on what the body expels and produces, where internal biological processes become external and disrupt the idea of the body as contained. There is a fine line between desire and repulsion. Women’s bodies, in their natural state, are both desired and feared. I create new reproductive forms within this tension, where attraction and discomfort meet. Bows, lace, and pearls are relics of my girlhood and part of this bodily memory. They carry an inherited understanding of femininity that exists alongside the grotesque. By bringing these things together, I am reclaiming the parts of the feminine that have been...

Artwork