One Day I’ll Start a Garden: an Interview with Megan Koeppel
Megan and I are currently in an Art Writing class together at Virginia Commonwealth University where we are pursuing our MFAs in Craft + Material Studies and Photography + Film, respectively. We were prompted to interview each other and found many crossovers between our work. This experience yielded insights into both of our arts practices and opened an important conversation about how to sustain oneself as an artist.
Megan Koeppel (b. 1996) is a craftsperson and visual artist originally from Milwaukee, WI. Her recent work centers around natural dye, contemporary textiles, and figurative painting. She has been invited to exhibit in spaces such as; Material Gallery + Studio (Milwaukee, WI), Var Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), Creative Alliance (Baltimore, MD), the University of Madison (Madison, WI), The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), Civitella Ranieri, (Umbertide, Italy) and an upcoming solo exhibition at VisArts Center in 2024 (Rockville, MD). She was selected to participate in the artist-in-residence program at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts from 2022-2023. Since participating in this residency she has been a visual artist fellow at Civitella Raneri (Umbertide, Italy 2023), a Bresler Resident at VisArts Center (Rockville, MD 2023), received the annual Trawick Prize Emerging Artist Award (Bethesda MD, 2023), and was the 2022 second award recipient for the annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Finalist Prize (Baltimore MD 2022).
LM: What brought you to fibers after your experience with painting and drawing? Can you talk about that medium shift?
MK: A lot of people learn to quilt and came to quilting from their family members, and usually a grandmother or a great-aunt, but I had a little bit of a less conventional introduction. As an undergraduate student, I started working with the Monument Quilt Project, which is a collection of quilt squares created by survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, and I assisted and volunteered with that project all throughout undergrad. I saw quilts as a tool for storytelling and activism in addition to being art objects or objects from the home, so that is how quilting and fibers first had a very influential part in my practice.
LM: Can you talk about the title of your recent work “Collective Celebrations of the Body,” particularly the word “collective?” What about your process, practice, or materials lends itself to collectivity?
MK: More recently, I am working in screen printing, and that is always a collaborative, busy studio where a lot of people are working together and sharing the same space. I think that the process of working with natural dyes is similar. There is a lot of research you can do about it and there are definitely resources, but I feel like most people come to it by word of mouth and seeing indigo vats in person and plants growing in small urban farms or community farms, and so I feel like natural dye itself has a lot of collective mentality to it. Natural dyers purposefully, or not purposefully, form collectives to grow plants, share materials and process. And then that title, “Collective Celebrations of the Body,” came from a workshop I taught for part of that exhibition with Hannah Brancato where we looked at the poem “The Body is not an Apology” and shared that at the beginning of our workshop series. We invited a dozen local fiber artists who wanted to learn about natural dye and wanted to reflect on their own bodies as makers and how those bodies might be represented in a gallery space, and we did some writing, sharing and exercises in natural dye-making where we were trying to create an environment for female, trans, and non-binary artists to celebrate their bodies, so that’s where that title came from, and then those works were featured in the exhibition that we had, so the exhibition title came from the workshop.
LM: I looked at some of your past work on your website and noticed your focus on the color red, and was also drawn to the title “Childhood Love Lessons.” Can you talk about how your use of color has evolved since that body of work?
MK: The title “Childhood Love Lessons” was taken from the book “All About Love” by bell hooks. There was a big crossover for me with using quilted materials, soft sculpture, childhood, and thinking about the love lessons we learn in childhood. Maybe some of those lessons are harder and not as healthy, and so I was making a lot of abstractions thinking about that. The color red goes back to working on the Monument Quilt project. That project was so influential to me as an emerging artist that I think I had a little bit of a hard time moving on from it. I missed that community collective aspect of a bunch of people sewing on industrial machines and making in the studio. The Monument Quilt used the color red on the majority of their quilts as a way to catch people’s attention, raise awareness, and take up a lot of space with a really bold color. I was thinking about how that color might apply to my own practice. It was a little bit of a default for awhile to use a monochromatic, but bold, color that took up a lot of space even if it was a small object. I feel like my color sensibilities have evolved a lot. I go back and forth between working in more neutral tones and then working with a full rainbow. Right now, my color palette is dependent on what kind of natural dyes I’m using at that time and how I’m researching that. Sometimes work will be monochromatic and yellow because I’m working with marigolds that I grow, and sometimes I want to show the whole spectrum of color that natural dyes can give you, so I will work with a whole rainbow palette; it shifts from project to project.
LM: Going back to the shift in color palette, I’m curious how you see yourself taking up space now, without the bold color?
MK: I’ve started using a lot more pink. There are obviously a lot of things you can talk about with the color pink—it being a color some people love and some people really don’t like, and its associations with femininity—but working with the color pink has a lot to do with using cochineal, the beetle that produces a bright pink pigment. It is also one of our most potent sources for getting red through a natural dye. Cochineal also has this history of being used to paint on walls and paint on textiles. I am really interested in thinking about it as a tool for painting large swaths of it on the wall. So, I’m taking up space with color in that way of focusing on that bright pink and using it similarly to how I was using the red. This year I have also been focused a lot more on installation. I think grad school lends itself to going really big, so I have been creating a lot of installation works that are large in scale, usually larger than my body or 5x5 feet, that viewers can walk around and immerse themselves in.
LM: Can you talk more about the scale and installation of this specific piece in “Collective Celebrations of the Body?”
From Collective Celebrations of the Body
MK: That exhibition was the first time I was showing a quilted body of work, and not just one or two pieces. I was really trying to think about quilts: usually we hang them like paintings and we just think about seeing the top of the quilt. But when you look at the back of a quilt, you can see all of the quilted stitches and a lot of the time there is a pattern on the back. I was thinking about trying to move the quilt off the wall, so I was thinking about hanging things from the ceiling, out from the wall, or draped over pedestals. For this work, I had it hung over people’s heads because I was thinking about how with textile pieces, a lot of times people want to touch it even if they know what it will feel like. I wanted to have the viewer look at it from this strange angle and wonder why you are not invited to touch it.
LM: Where do you see yourself this time next year at the end of your MFA? Do you have any specific goals or hopes for your practice growing and changing?
MK: I think the work is going to look really different. I’m trying to leave it open so that what needs to change can change, but I have been really interested in textile books and creating things that people can handle, since a lot of times people do want to touch textile work. I think there’s this idea that you have to make work that’s big that I’ve fallen into, so I’m hoping to do more material research-based work. I work with screenprinting and embroidery as well as different dye techniques, and I feel like there is a lot to be explored and tested. Sharing all of those tests is an interesting thing to see from other people’s studio practice. A lot of my work is big and installation-based, so I've been thinking about if I’m not interested in people purchasing my work, what other form could it take? So I’ve been thinking about making sample books that people can handle, which also goes into the history of textile books and embroidery samples as part of that. I’m also thinking about accessibility and trying to incorporate things people can read so they don’t feel like they can’t understand what they are seeing.
LM: How has writing influenced your art practice, and vice versa?
MK: I think the writing class has been really helpful in expanding what I write about when I write about my work. I have latched onto two key ideas of the materials and concepts that I work with, and having opportunities to write about my work, I think there is even more to discuss, even just through writing a couple sentences about one piece and realizing it is about dozens of other things. It is helpful for expanding the language to talk about my work, but it has made it more difficult to write a conventional artist statement.
LM: I’m curious about natural dye as someone who has not worked in textiles or fiber. How does the natural world inspire you to make work, or what is your relationship to the natural world?
MK: I’ve been really lucky that I’ve always had a very strong relationship to the natural world, even though I’ve also spent a lot of time in cities. I grew up near Lake Michigan on the border of a swampy woodsy area, so I was playing outside a lot as a kid; I was in boats and swimming a lot. Over the past few years I’ve also been able to do a couple residencies. One of them was in east Tennessee right near the Smokies, so I spent a lot of time hiking. A year or two after that I had a residency at a park and retreat center. In the late 19th century this man built a big house in central Illinois and hired a bunch of gardeners to put his international modern art collection into these gardens, so there are all of these outdoor sculptures in these botanical gardens. Working with natural dyes opens up the opportunity to apply to things like that where I get to be in the natural environment and continue to think about how plants relate to my work and think about how so much of what we do comes from cotton or already comes from plants even if we don’t have a close relationship with it day to day.
LM: Where do you find inspiration outside of an academic setting or looking at other artists? What about your life inspires you?
MK: That’s a harder question, because so much of my work is about looking at other artists or art history. I think the main inspiration is from the other people in my life who have similar interests, such as gardening or making work about the natural world, or who are interested in organizing. I was introduced to natural dyes because there was a natural dye garden a couple blocks away from my apartment in Baltimore. I feel like those free public programs are what led me to make the work I am making.
LM: What are your other hobbies and interests outside of artmaking?
MK: I love to swim. I did synchronized swimming for my whole childhood and traveled around the country to compete for it. After 10 years of not really swimming, since I didn’t have access to a pool, I’ve been swimming a lot. I’ve also been riding my bike a lot since moving to Richmond. I didn’t really ride my bike regularly before I moved here. Having something physical to do in addition to your studio practice, like going to the gym or swimming for an hour every single day, you kind of get to reset. It helps me maintain my schedule and get tired so I’m not up working on my stuff until 1 in the morning. That’s all. I don’t have any hobbies outside of art. One day I’ll start a garden.
