About

Bio

Megan Canning (b. 1976, Ohio) creates soft and sensuous paintings that reveal the hidden landscapes of the human body and the natural world. Embracing traditional textile techniques such as embroidery, soft sculpture, appliqué, quilting, and silk painting, Canning’s work challenges the boundary between painting and traditional textiles. 

Canning’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, the Museum of Arts & Design and The Pen & Brush in New York City. She has been awarded residences and fellowships from the Penland School of Craft, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Museum of Arts and Design.

Megan holds an MFA in Painting from Hunter College and a BFA in Art Eduation from Ohio University. After spending 25 years living and working in Brooklyn, NY, she now calls the Rocky Mountains of NW Montana home.

Artist Statement

What drives me as an artist is an intense desire to “make the invisible visible.”

I want my work to surprise, delight, and challenge one’s understanding of human consciousness. I want to instill a feeling of wonder and bring about a heightened awareness of what it means to be human. For the past twenty-five years, I’ve combined hand embroidery with paint, soft sculpture, applique, and text elements to create intricate paintings and wall hangings whose subjects have been the systems of the human body.

I first started embroidering into my paintings in graduate school when I was investigating the human skin as a site for memory. The fact that embroidery creates an orderly surface with a messy underbelly—just as human skin acts as a calm surface masking all the blood and guts of the body—made sense to me conceptually. At this time, I began to hand stitch into my paintings to draw attention to what lies beneath the surface.

My fascination with the hidden systems of the human body is born out of a deep interest in memory, human consciousness, and the profound influence of our interactions with others. We carry these experiences with us, like smells, sounds, touches, etc. Our body is our instrument—our senses communicate, interpret, and record everything we know of the world. Inside our bodies lies a beautiful universe wholly unfamiliar to most of us and yet fundamental not only to our survival but also to how we experience the world around us.

Over time, my interest and passion for the slow, labor-intensive process of hand embroidery eclipsed my interest in painting, and I began to teach myself the art of embroidery. I loved how much I was touching the work when I started embroidering — there was something too about piercing the paper, drawing the thread from underneath or below the surface, which placed my own body into the work in a more tangible way.

I’m deeply committed to and interested in the process and craft of embroidery, stitching, and working with fiber materials. The physicality of stitching by hand, quilting by hand. Bringing my body into the work in a palpable way. I think that’s one of the reasons that doing everything by hand, by my own hand, is so important to me. I want to feel the materials, the layers of stitching, physically experience the making without the aid of machines or others.

June 2020 | Brooklyn, NY

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