Meagan Stirling

My Body, My Flag is a series of prints that use the American flag and imprints of my own body to create abstract works addressing women’s historical erasure and the nation’s obsessive attachment to its flag. The process involves wrapping myself in the burial flag that was folded and presented to my family at my father’s graveside service, then laying my body onto an inked plate. This act produces marks that reveal both my form and the flag’s embossment, mapping personal history while also confronting today’s cultural moment and the ongoing erasure within America’s collective memory. 

Monoprint, each 30”x42”

This series of prints is based on the clothing that my children have outgrown. Each stencil is hand drawn and then screen printed; I piece shapes and colors together until the clothing becomes apparent. This lengthy process is integral, requiring commitment and discipline, echoing the joys and struggles in caregiving.

Once I have completed a print, my daughters respond to the original prints, adding their own marks, which form the final layers of the screen print. The results are chaotic, yet joyful, interacting with my controlled and meticulous layers which also express my maternal experience of raising two girls. The act of allowing control and chaos to intermingle suggests my desire to examine the meaning of connections and relationships.

According to folklore, one of the most well-known nursery rhymes, Ring-around the Rosie, was originally a children’s playful way of describing the Great Plague in England during the 1600s. In March 2020, during the early stages of this project and of the COVID-19 pandemic, the traditional rhyme began to take on new meaning. I often hear my own children singing the rhyme as a playful game in which they dance in a ring holding hands, then suddenly stop, and fall to the ground.

A group of artists founded Print Power as a means of offering our community opportunities to express trauma through the creative process of printmaking. We were awarded an ‘Arts Making Impact’ grant by the City of Santa Barbara at the end of 2019 for continuing workshops in the Spring of 2020 in collaboration with Domestic Violence Solutions (DVS). We were able to host four workshops before being interrupted by the COVID19 pandemic.

Fortunately, we were able to adapt our project by creating a Postcard Kit activity. We provided 100 kits containing materials for making designs on blank postcards. Pre-stamped and addressed envelopes were included so that finished artworks could be returned to us. Participants created their own expression of healing, and received an artwork from another participant. Each artwork received was digitally archived and can be seen here.

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These prints are direct object monoprints of my children’s outgrown clothing and the aprons that my daughter and I wore for the Digging a Hole performance. Each piece of clothing is placed directly onto an inked press bed with a piece of muslin on top of the clothing. The clothing is then run through the press with a high pressure. The clothing is carefully removed, which leaves the ghostly residual image behind on the press bed. Arches 88 paper is placed on this residual image and run through the press creating the final version.

Performance Stills and Video Photo Credit: M. Bradley Elliott Video Running Length: 2 hours, 36 minutes

Digging a Hole pays homage to the desire to know, to understand, to connect in meaningful ways. It partakes of ritual, requiring commitment and discipline. On face, it seems a futile endeavor. Nevertheless, this apparent act of futility ascribes value to the thing desired – connection, relationship, and communion with mother and child. Digging a Hole was performed from September to November in my backyard. The artwork includes the documentation of the performance in video and photography.

I began digging in September; my womb full with my second child. My first child was there too, shovel in hand, picking out rocks and clumps of sunbaked clay. The daily digging became a ritual formed over time; the everyday act of reverence and intention into action. The result; a large hole to be filled. Birth and death; the unfathomable and empty all jumbled up in this moment, the work of living the joy and pain, mother and child inextricably linked.

Print Power was initiated in early 2018 through a residency and series of workshops at the Community Arts Workshop (CAW). Participants are given an opportunity to use screen printing as a means of sharing feelings and messages visually that may be too difficult to verbalize enabling them to process trauma in healthy and community-driven ways.

During Sexual Assault Awareness Month (April 2018) Print Power hosted a month of free printmaking workshops at CAW to anyone affected by sexual assault. Again, the project used screen printing as a tool to help participants engage their emotions and translate them into a meaningful visual flag during a 2-3 hour workshop.

The project culminated in an exhibition of the flags in which participants, as well as the public, were invited to attend the opening reception celebrating their journey.

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With thanks to: The City of Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara Foundation, Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative, and Casey at the Community Arts Workshop. Photographs courtesy of Barbara Parmet.

I have a box.
It’s a brown cardboard box.
I know exactly where it is,
and I know exactly what the box holds.
It’s a vessel, container, depository, and reliquary for objects that are invested in a specific memory.

The box is stored in the upper part of my garage. It requires a ladder to reach. I haven’t opened it or shared the contents with anyone since it was sealed with packaging tape 18 years ago. It’s holding a moment of time outside of time. I am afraid of forgetting.

My box holds something. A collection of things are inside – negatives and photos, yearbooks and magazines. A mix of internal and external is invested in this box.

Everyone has boxes. They may be metaphorical, empty of actual objects. The contents residing only in the mind, as a symbol for wounds that are healed, leaving the trace of a scar. Or they might be memories, hopes, or disappointments packaged and put away in storage.

Drypoint and aquatint on paper, 16”x16” and 22”x30”

These prints blend imagery derived from wind energy turbines, shooting range targets, and my memories. The targets and spherical spray of punctures produced by a shotgun represent life's wonder in the midst of fragility, isolation, chance, and disappointment. The visual references to wind energy and lungs connect to the unwieldiness of life and death, leaving me to wrestle with something bigger than myself. 

This installation consisted of small paper-mache houses, some of which were fully intact, others that had been shot with a shotgun. The houses hung from a 18-foot ceiling and were arranged in the pattern of a suburban cul-de-sac.

Paper-mache and mixed media, 2010, each 9" x 4" x 5"

As part of a collaboration with artist, Lance Sinnema, Bacon & Eggs was constructed of felt and latex. Schlepped around the city of Spokane and photographed, neighbors and community members had the opportunity to witness the breakfast foods making their way to the hottest spots in town.

These prints were part of a solo exhibition at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, Washington. I had recently moved into an old yellow house on a double lot in Spokane. Because it was an old house, there was a certain nostalgia that led my thoughts to times when life seemed less complicated. I often rework my own experiences in an attempt to reconstruct an idealized way of life. Life is not predictable, safe, frequented only by good neighbors, or necessarily successful. The patterns of life are just as likely to be marked by the unexpected – change, disappointment, tragedy.

The participation in the investigation of language, monitoring preference, and documentation were communicated in this exhibit. The exhibit, a collaboration with artist Jonathan Chamberlain, consisted of hundreds of hanging tags, each with two letters of a four-letter word screenprinted on each side of the tag. Large piles of sticks were located on one side of the room with a pile of stones on the other side. Viewers were invited to choose a side of the gallery, either sticks or stones, and throw a stick or stone of their choosing across the room, hitting the tags. As the tags spun after being hit, new words were created.

Mixed media installation, 2008

The impetus for this installation was based on my observations of suburban sprawl. Suburban communities are surreal in their design, often times multiplied over and over throughout the United States. While, the communities themselves are real, there is a sense that the imagined suburban experience is unreal. The interior included hand-printed, patterned wallpaper and the floor was covered in packaging peanuts as a means of protecting the space. A soundtrack playing in the gallery of ambient neighborhood sounds (automatic garage door closing, a lawn mower, children playing in the park, dogs barking, the thump of a newspaper delivery, and birds chirping) were only slightly disturbed by thunderstorms and gunshots.

Mixed media installation, 2007

The Cleveland’s Diner installation was prompted from a desire to integrate the aesthetics of Cleveland’s with life, and to represent these as dynamic and fluid. A film I produced, projected in Cleveland’s, served as a mirror image; the clientele viewed a reflection of themselves and the daily activities of Cleveland’s. Screenprinted tablecloths and napkins with exterior images of Cleveland’s adorned the tables.

Cakewalk, a collaboration with artist Jonathan Chamberlain, is a film based on several photographs of the Palouse, a region encompassing parts of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. The peculiar and picturesque dunes, which characterize the Palouse consist of more or less random humps and hollows. Seemingly dull, this geographical area possesses an unconscious beauty within the pattern and rhythm of the day-to-day.

These prints began with my interest in deteriorating and abandoned places. My observations of architectural beams, walls, bridges, and power-lines are all defining imagery in this serigraphy work. The images of old, falling apart spaces themselves intrigue me, and my attempt was to represent my experience of these spaces – both the interior space, which represented the experience of time, memory and narrative – and the exterior, which did not allow for narrative.