Lot 28 - Meghan Salisbury - Left

Pencil on paper
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Moriah Ogunbiyi

About

Meghan Salisbury (b. 2001, London, UK) is currently the Artist in Residence at The Royal High School Bath, and completed her BA at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2024.

Recent exhibitions: ‘Porphureos’, Gallery daSein, Shenzhen (2025); ‘Fizz, Droop and Drool’, New Wave Art prize exhibition, City Lit Gallery, London (2024); ‘Slade School of Fine Art BA/BFA Degree Show’, Slade School of Fine Art, London (2024)

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork

Through painting, I create a visual language for the processes and forms people are made up of, but often cannot see or feel.

My hands and eyes can’t reach my insides, instead they look and grab at what’s outside my body. But, I process the external world through my insides. (This filtering of the external world as it enters my mind, is echoed when Milton’s Satan famously says ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’ (Paradise Lost, Book 1, Lines 221–270.)

The separation and symbiosis of my body, mind and surroundings is an aspect of living in a material body that I often return to in my work.

In Paradise Lost, once the fruit is eaten Adam and Eve’s relationship to and experience of having a material body changes - they become embarrassed of their nakedness, they become mortal, Eve is cursed with giving birth painfully, their bodies can never be satiated and so Adam must continuously farm to provide food. As a starting point for making the cards, I gave myself a problem / narrative, like: ‘Draw hunger’; ‘Draw what happened inside Adam and Eve’s bodies the moment they bit the forbidden fruit.’

I ended up creating:
external bodies rolling away from their internal bodies, and external bodies sliding around and curling up inside their insides,
geometric shapes splicing up and embedded in organic forms,
floating holes and containers,
limbs both inside and outside the holes,
forms which, because they are simultaneously reminiscent of human bodies, objects and insentient creatures, create confusion about whether they are purely functional or not - like a rug-worm-VILI or a toothpick-leg.

Except in ‘Leaving’, the garish colours creating the landscapes / settings are playful. In a context of loss and brokenness, the playfulness of the colours becomes complicated - they are uncaring and mocking in their playfulness.
And if, for example, the green in ‘Boil’ is read as a sky, the green is out-of-place, relentlessly saturated and artificial, as if the sky has been poisoned.
(In Paradise Lost, nature grieved its separation from God - ‘Earth trembled from her entrails’ (Book 9, Line 1000) - exemplifying both the damage that seeped into every aspect of the world, and Milton’s use of forms from external surroundings to express humans’ internal state.)

The textures in and of the cards are also ambivalent. Bouncy bodily forms and gestural marks creating bubbling, rushing motions, make the previously silent cards lively.
But, the cards’ surfaces also became vulnerable during the drawing process - they are ripped and fuzzy in areas from being repeatedly dug into by pencils. Acrylic forms are clotted, matte and cracking. And areas with softer swathes of colour highlight the pitted surface of the postcard.