This is a new suite of work by Meg Cowell celebrating her signature ethereal dresses and poetic memento mori representations. While Meg's work has always dealt with moments of transition, in these new works there is a real sense of spiritual energy at play, expressed through her use of cloudy, opalescent waters suggestive of things in a state of vaporous disintegration, and via her still life vanitas’ of faded flowers and human skulls. She says of her aims for this series “I am wanting to capture the hopeful, beautiful, vulnerable flower blooming in harsh uncertain times and terrain." (Excerpt from essay by Phe Luxford)
Artist statement:
Catalogue Essay by Eric Henshall, 2020
Nocturne – Art for the night. The night is beautiful. The night is romantic. The night is menacing. And so it is with Meg Cowell’s sumptuous photographic works.
Cowell’s work is undoubtedly beautiful as any star-filled night, but within that beauty lies a subtle sense of menace. Somehow, as we gaze at the luminous glory of these delicate frocks, we feel uneasy - as though we might perhaps be looking at death in a ball gown. The works are lush with rococo splendour – the pastel satins of the gowns are trapped in an eternal, graceful dance. They are romantic images that call to mind candle-lit soirees of Belle Époque elegance; and yet the decadent silks begin to dissipate into smoke at their edges, becoming unreal, immaterial; like Cinderella’s carriage, the façade of beauty is a temporary glamour that quickly evaporates in the light of dawn - or in this case, into the infinite black void.
Acting as momento mori, these sensual dresses are sisters to the smoking skulls in their floral wreaths. The hollow eye sockets and the satin folds all tell us that, ‘Yes, life is beautiful but it is fragile and we will die.’ This intertwining of beauty and death is an enduring theme in Cowell’s work; as is the delicate balance she achieves between the constant, fluid movement of the dresses - they seem alive and vibrant, caught in a single moment - and the unalterable permanence of each and every crease of luxurious fabric - they are as immortal and unbending as the stones of Rome. These fairytale gowns are at once ephemeral and eternal.
The dresses are alive; we can almost hear their heartbeat. But they are unoccupied - where we expect to see a delicately arching neck, an outstretched arm, rosebud lips there is instead only nothing, only that endless black void. It is as though the gowns have consumed their human hosts and somehow grown stronger, and even more exquisite, for it. They are beautiful and lustrous, but these are predatory creatures; pastel-coloured night hunters.
We know this, we sense it, and yet we are enchanted still. Such is the power of Cowell’s work - that knife-edge balance between menace and beauty.
