Interview with Katie Bonadies, April 2024
Meghan Newell Reedy is an artist working in fiber and paper. She weaves, mends, knits, and sews to make clothes. On paper she draws and practices calligraphy. Both mediums are an opportunity for Meghan to make sense of herself and the world. She has been a member since October 2022.
The effort and the surprise of returning to the current moment are recurring themes for Meghan. Creating is an opportunity for her to pay close attention, to explore and identify her emotions, to find out what’s happening inside of her. ‘Here’ is a word that seems to appear a lot in her works on paper, “That’s a super interest for me because it can be so difficult to stay inside the current moment or seem like that’s going to be constraining like somehow there’s not enough right now but in the future there will be enough. But it’s good to be in the now when we get there.” Both of her media are different ways of staying in the moment or noticing what is meaningful and creating without the productive urge. Working on paper and weaving on the loom have similar outcomes for Meghan; she always feels better afterward, and they are processes of watching things emerge, “I sit at the loom and do the things and suddenly it was all thread, which is kind of one dimension, and now it’s two dimensions. Nothing has changed about the thread, and everything has changed in the fabric.” With drawing there’s the pencil and the page and when they make contact the materials become something different.
The experience of weaving fiber creates a similar feeling for Meghan, but it is a much different process due to the loom’s necessity for bringing order to chaos. Weaving requires precision because each thread has to go through a specific reed and heddle. Weaving is something people have done for tens of thousands of years, somewhat unchanged, “It seems like one of the things that’s maybe not quite as old as fire. We needed it as a way of turning things that couldn’t be clothes into clothes.” Meghan is currently in the middle of warping her loom, the process of setting up the vertical threads on the loom that will hold the ‘weft’ thread attached to the shuttle that weaves through the vertical ‘warp’ threads. The actual weaving process lasts much longer and is a satisfying release for her after all of the set up.
Meghan uses the loom to make wool and linen twill fabric that she uses to make clothes. She sews on a Singer sewing machine that’s in perfect condition and belonged to her grandmother that is set in a beautifully hand-carved desk. She’s been making clothes since she was a teenager and she's interested in making garments that are simple, waste as little fabric as possible, and allow for full range of motion. The styles she creates are typically slightly boxy and drapey and have more fabric at the joints and gussets. Sometimes she feels dissonance because though she enjoys the process of making fabric and turning it into clothes, she doesn’t always want to wear every piece of clothing that she makes.
Her process on paper has evolved into a form of deliberate spontaneity. For a long time Meghan had worked within constraints and would always start by drawing a spiral, first with her right hand and then with her left hand over top of it. Like a form of automatic writing, she would see if words would come and explore what words appeared when she wrote with her right hand versus when she wrote with her left. Meghan had learned to write with her left hand when she worked as a receptionist after college and her boredom led to an important discovery for her: the process helps her find out who and what she is at that moment. “It’s super interesting and every now and then there’s a conversation between them like the right hand will say, ‘What is happening?’ and the left hand replies, ‘Stop it.’" Each hand has a very distinct and legible appearance that feels in line with its voice.
Meghan is always working on spirals; she's been drawing them for almost a decade because she enjoys the motion. For a while she would draw them daily and found them expressive despite using the same form over and over again, "They show me my own temperature really quickly and they are a single line, and it can fill the whole page and get really complex when they overlap." For a long time she took care not to overlap the lines and more and more she finds that she lets them cross themselves and become less circular. For her the spiral shape feels old like one of the motions our arms make.
Many of her spirals are drawn on graph paper and this got Meghan thinking about how prominent grids and boxes are in our lives, which led her to timecards. There was a store full of timecards and she started to think about how they represent our daily lived experience, and that the important information is 'time in' and 'time out' and the absurdity of measuring our lives in this way. She started using timecards as the base of her art to record her actual lived experiences and decorated them with things like poetry and watercolors, “It left me with this interest in how we are not square creatures. Our arms don’t move in squares.” The dissonance can be enlivening in how it exemplifies the contrast, which is why she’s interested in seeing how spirals and calligraphy look on graph paper because they don’t fit inside the boxes.
Meghan has been thinking about finding the words for our experience and what is true and what is hard and feels good but is frightening, “Do I really want to know? There’s going to be ramifications, a cascade of things that have to change, that I am going to understand.” The discomfort is an indicator of transformation and change and it takes time to get enough distance or clarity. She is also fascinated by the physicality of making art, altering objects is a tangible way of interacting with the world. She finds it validating to work in a space where other people are engaged in their own version of artmaking for their own reasons, on their own trajectories, “...to come here and be in that mix, I value it so much.”
Contact Meghan at hundredfreedoms@proton.me.
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