Wolfkill, Megan
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Megan Wolfkill
Megan Wolfkill is an MFA student in painting + drawing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Megan grew up in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee called Germantown, and relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana to pursue her undergraduate studies at Tulane University. With an interest in creating movement as well as physical works, Megan received a BFA in both Dance and Studio Art, and graduated in 2018. During her time at Tulane, Megan studied of a semester in Florence, Italy, and focused on pattern creation and geometric abstraction in her paintings.
Following graduation, Megan has attended residencies at both Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and The Hambidge Center in Georgia. She has also had work in various group exhibitions in the New Orleans area. Outside of making art, Megan has worked as a personal trainer and group fitness instructor, calling back her interest in the physical body and movement.
Megan is beginning to deeply investigate her interest in pattern making and breaking as it relates to the rhythm of the natural world, and will continue this investigation as a first year grad student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Artist Statement
Pattern is the ultimate manifestation of expectation since it must repeat. This clear form of expectation can be a source of comfort, whether the pattern is visual, behavioral, or historical. I explore disrupting expectation by forcing a breakdown of pattern in the form of misplaced colors, the introduction of new shapes, or the revelation of preceding layers of visual information. Though I intentionally set tight boundaries in my work through the use of geometry and pattern, I push these self-imposed boundaries to discover all that can happen within a simple set of rules.
My paintings give me the opportunity to be open to my thoughts and to evaluate dissonance within myself and the world around me. Trusting in a defined system like pattern allows me to let go of control and enter a meditative state while I go through the physical motions of making pattern. Though this trust in regularity yields comfort, it can also create awkward pileups of visual clutter as I layer dissonant patterns into the same image. The push and pull between fulfillment of expectation and discovery of discordant interruption continues to hold my attention, and I fight to strike a balance between comfort and cacophony.