ARTIST STATEMENT 

My work moves between painting, embroidery, video, and digital collage, often combining analog techniques with technology to explore memory — both personal and collective, lived and imagined. I think of memory as a place: soft-edged, layered, shifting across timelines and perspectives. Through sewing, painting, and image transfer, I try to stay with what feels fleeting — to hold space for yearning, for reflection, for things we want to forget but can’t, or never knew but still long for.

I’m drawn to dualities: strength and softness, nature and screens, consumerism and empathy. My materials often reflect this — combining tactile elements like thread and paint with pixelated video or image transfer. I’m influenced by Walter Benjamin’s idea of the "aura" and the diminishing power of the copy, and by the ways we replicate ourselves online until our identities blur. Whether working with floral forms, found footage, or stitched textile fragments, I try to create spaces that feel both intimate and disquieting — like remembering something that never really happened, or laughing while crying.

Above all, I want the viewer to feel something faintly familiar — a nostalgia not quite their own.

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BIO 

Meaghan Sweeney is a multidisciplinary artist originally from the United States and currently based in Turin, Italy. Her work spans painting, embroidery, video, and digital collage, and explores memory as both subject and medium — touching on themes of nostalgia, trauma, femininity, and overconsumption. Through layered processes that merge tactile craft with digital techniques, she examines the tension between strength and softness, technology and nature, personal history and public image.

She is currently developing three interrelated series of mixed-media paintings: Lenzuola rooted in floral motifs and individual reflection, Cape Cod exploring consumerism and familial heritage, and 2 large format works investigating abstraction, time, and sound (inspired by Brian Eno and the visual rhythm of Koyaanisqatsi). All three bodies of work explore emotional memory, cultural repetition, and the blurred lines between the real and the re-lived. Meaghan will take these themes with her into her upcoming residency at Art Sharm in Egypt this September.