Megan Carroll

Megan Carroll is a Vancouver ceramic artist working with paperclay.  Her process involves enriching porcelain slip with paper fiber and soaking found fabrics in the resulting slurry. This fabric is then molded around balloon forms and allowed to dry.  After the clay/fabric has hardened, and the balloon removed, it is fired three times.  The first firing removes all the combustible material, leaving the pattern of the fabric behind.  A glaze is then added to the inside of the form both to provide strength and highlight the texture of the piece. Finally, a metallic luster glaze is applied to the fortuitous rim of each piece before being fired for the third and final time. 

Megan's current work evolved during months of enforced bed rest while she was pregnant with twins.  The difficult work of bringing babies into the world brought into clear focus the idea of "women's work".  Many of the techniques used to produce the current forms have some relationship to traditional female work – gathering found materials, layering and cutting fabric, sewing, quilting, making pots and 'decorating'.  The rounded forms created by inhaled air echo swollen pregnant bellies, taking up novel spaces as they are stretched into new shapes. 

The thinness and fragility of the forms represents the very thin line between life and death during development – any birth is a miraculous end to an extremely unlikely chain of events.  From the ideal beginning of the perfect cell, forces beyond our control or perception act to 'deform' us to our own reality.  The current pieces began as round forms, and through the forces of gravity and fire achieved their current, non-ideal forms.