TX Studio: Megan Harrison Looks for the Defining Moments

Nancy Zastudil·
San AntonioTexas StudioVisual Art
·

The universe is infinite; it’s a small world. Life is short; the night is long. It’s just dumb luck; everything happens for a reason. Our human existence is full of shifting, contradictory beliefs like these. But as Octavia Butler wrote, the only lasting truth is change.

San Antonio-based artist Megan Harrison knows about change. “I spend a lot of time outdoors, in nature. I’m drawn to the natural world because it’s more complicated than I can really understand,” she tells me during our recent conversation about her work. “It’s always unfolding and changing.”

Harrison has spent most of her career making life’s awe-inducing experiences visible through materials. She received her MFA in 2012 from the University of Texas San Antonio with a concentration in painting and drawing, and today she uses ink, paper, photography, installation, and more to give form to life’s wonders—the stuff of life that can leave us without words, like geologic time and cosmic weather, and more everyday magic, such as how our bodies respond to the world around us.

“Walking through the woods at night without a flashlight is one of my favorite things to do because I can never quite tell what I’m looking at. I get prickles on the back of my neck,” she says. Responsive qualities and defining moments make their way into her artwork, too. For example, pouring ink onto wet paper and watching it seep, creep, and permeate.

Prior to 2020, Harrison explains, “The world was an enchanting, amazing place, and I was out in it. I had traveled through Peru, Mexico, and Europe. My husband, who’s also an artist, and I were able to travel around the country for six months.” In 2019 they spent time in Berlin when Harrison was artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, through Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum. At the time, she enjoyed feeling like “an infinitely small thing in an infinite universe.”

But then San Antonio shut down for COVID. That same week, Harrison and her husband lost their second child, who was born still just weeks before the due date. As she recounts the events of that time, she reaches for the right words: “The combination was… It’s hard to describe. I didn’t make artwork for about a year. I just didn’t see the point in it.”

The experience was halting.

“Our world contracted. There had been this big world, this endless universe. And then it shrank to the size of our house,” she says. “It was a claustrophobic, traumatic space, and it was just the three of us—me, my husband, and our first child—going through a traumatic process of grief. It was just bizarre. So dense and heavy, like a black hole.”

When Harrison did start making art again, the scale shifted. She went from making immersive landscapes down to intimately scaled images and objects. These artworks—devotional-like family portrait paintings, figurines, garden studies, ink drawings, and texts—were never intended to be shown publicly.

Meanwhile, the art world was groaning and shifting too. Harrison’s solo show at Blue Star Contemporary had been scheduled for the summer of 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic. From Your Brow Rise Leaf and Lyre eventually opened in spring of 2022.

“As the postponed Blue Star show date got closer and closer, I kept trying to imagine the artwork for the show…I wanted to meld the abstract inky drawings with more recognizable subject matter of landscape,” says Harrison. “But I just couldn’t. lt felt so forced. And then I realized that the artworks that I had been making for about a year—all these little, tiny paintings—were gonna have to be it.”

The resulting exhibition was a profound, contemplative space. Her ink drawings hung floor to ceiling on each wall, acting as a backdrop and support for the smaller works.

Then, last summer, change remained true to form. Her mother passed away unexpectedly.

The artist made a request of the numerous deathbed visitors: bring an ink pad so that she could take her mother’s fingerprint. When someone offered a gigantic ink pad, Harrison realized that it was large enough for her mother’s handprint. Shortly after, during her residency at Elsewhere Studios in Colorado, she had the prints notarized, creating a work on paper and poem titled The Visit.

Harrison’s recent exhibition, also titled The Visit, at Gallery 100 on the Palo Alto Campus, “speaks to experiences surrounding the death of a loved one, how we attend to their body and how we process the objects and ephemera that remain.”

The exhibition centered on a makeshift room, the construction of which was visible and appeared to have been abruptly abandoned, simultaneously forming the room and causing its undoing. The space, formed by wall-size ink drawings, held heirloom furniture including her mother’s desk, a few chairs, and other objects that vibrated with life, and death. If there is comfort to be had in death, perhaps it lies in the fact that it is a universal experience of change. Even if we never make sense of it. Some might call it a wonder.

“Even though we die—we all die, and we all know it—I don’t think our brains are designed to understand it. Otherwise, life would be too hard,” says Harrison. “We’re designed to live, and so death disrupts everything we’re designed to understand.”

—NANCY ZASTUDIL

Nancy Zastudil

Nancy Zastudil is an editor and curator working toward equitable representation in and access to the arts.