Meghan Taitano

MEGAN TAITANO

2023-24 EMERGE AIR; print

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Megan Taitano is the current RWS EMERGE Artist in Residence in Print. Megan grew up in Guam and didn’t know what printmaking was until she got to college. She immediately fell in love with the process and graduated from MECA&D in 2016 with a BFA in Printmaking.



Megan struggled to continue her practice after graduation because she was burnt out from her thesis project. Her thesis’s focus was on Guam’s culture and its relationship to being a mostly unknown part of America and the erasure of Guamanian culture. The project was a 10' x 10' woven hanging piece made from multiple varied collagraph prints of textures that represented the ocean in which she wove in etchings of myths, stories, and ideas as well as silk screened tropical fish. One such etching used in her thesis, called Island Eater, depicted the myth of the giant parrot fish that nibbled the island into its shape during a famine in which the women of the island wove a net out of their hair to catch the giant fish and feed the people, ending the famine.

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Upon graduation, Megan received a scholarship that granted her access to a press for a few months, an opportunity she feels she wasn’t able to fully take advantage of while making the transition from student to working artist, starting a new job and moving. At the time she had a lot of anxiety around making a living as an artist and it manifested as a creative block. By chance, Megan ended up at a dog daycare and started making pet portraits. From there her practice grew and she started getting back into bookmaking, making blank journals for others to use and enjoy, which is a repetitive process that doesn’t take up a lot of mental space. Megan is aware she puts too much pressure on herself to make something ‘worthwhile’, but pet portraits and bookmaking have kept her in a regular artistic practice because she is able to work in these mediums without imposing expectations on herself. It doesn’t take Megan long to complete these projects and the feeling of accomplishment motivates her to keep working.



In her bookmaking practice, Megan experiments with different stitches and uses upcycled materials. She’s always finding unique papers with a variety of textures like wallpaper samples of leopards standing on top of each other or weird bird scenes in different colors. She has started using her old misprints too and working this way has inspired her to get back into printmaking. She recently made a relief print–the printing technique in which a surface is cut away creating a raised image that is then inked and transferred to another surface–of a couple of hounds she got to know and love at the dog daycare.

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The EMERGE residency has provided Megan a space to play and experiment in her printmaking. She is grateful to have access to an etching press and loves that she can explore endless ideas through variations of color and texture and make multiples without losing her original sketch. The process of changing the plate, making marks, and trying new things to develop a print makes her happy. She may eventually lose the plate in the process, but finds joy in working the plate until it’s gone. Right now she is focusing on creating marbled etchings and using oil pastels as stop out for their soft mottled effect. She uses Baldwin Ink Ground and mixes it with lavender oil in a water bath to create the marbling that will become the backgrounds of her etchings. She likes this process for the lack of control she has over the design and because it is an exercise in pareidolia as she looks for faces in the blotches. She looks for these faces in stains and woodgrains as well and creates what she calls ‘doodle creatures’ out of the patterns she finds. This is an important part of her process because she likes to use her prints as her sketchbook and work with the image rather than starting with a sketch and a plan.

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Megan gets inspired while walking her dog, looking for random marks, and searching for patterns on ceilings or down on the ground. She says, “Everything is an accumulation of marks over time.” She also finds a lot of dead animals on her walks with her dog and after a while the remains become more interesting. She finds the transition odd, and the next etching she plans to work on is inspired by a bird she found in a crosswalk, “The only way to tell it’s a bird is because of the beak and a claw; everything else was a jumbled mess, deteriorating each time a car went by.” She doesn’t know what this will lead to but she wants to see where it goes. Animals will always be a source of inspiration for her.



Meet Megan at the farmers market in Deering Oaks on Saturdays when it's not raining, as well as the first annual Main Street Market at Thornton Academy on November 19, 2023 from 9a.m. to 3p.m. Her books will also be available at the annual Holly Berry Arts & Crafts Fair on Sunday November 26, 2023 from 9a.m. - 3p.m. in Naples, Maine. She will also be at Two Sisters in Maine, a pop-up shop at 124 Main Street in Freeport on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and weekends, November 1 - December 31, 2023 from 10a.m. - 6p.m. She also pops up wherever there’s space during First Friday Art Walk in Portland. Find Megan on Instagram @landlesscraft and through her website land-less-craft.com.

Images provided by Bret Woodard.