Meghan Rowswell: Out-of-this-world textile sculpture!

Have you ever wanted to create fibre art sculptures but wondered how to shape them into self-supporting objects?

Meet textile artist Meghan Rowswell who creates large organic fibre sculptures, alien and triffid-like, inspired by nature. Achieving a BA in Art History at Hastings College in 2009, Meghan has exhibited in galleries and art spaces across the United States. In 2014, while living in Japan, she achieved the title of Fifth Level Instructor at the Ohara School of Ikebana. Using this knowledge of Japanese flower arranging and design she works predominantly with fabrics, aiming to restore their vitality and substance through arrangement, layering and creating structure, to bring her sculptures to life. Meghan’s eccentric large-scale textile structures look like they have come from another world.

Meghan has completed a residency at Art Farm Nebraska and was an Artist INC Kansas City fellow. Also, she is a member of The PolyArtery Collective, a four-artist group that received the Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC and the Interpretive Grant from Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area. The PolyArtery Collective were semi-finalists for the Rocket Grant in 2017 for their immersive art experience, “Weaving the River.” Meghan’s work has been published in two books and in the media and has been featured on the television programme “Mid Missouri Art Talk.” She is the current Blog Content Director for the Military Spouse Fine Artist Network.

In this interview explore Meghan’s exaggerated and fantasy-inspired textile sculptures. She shares how she first got into sewing and embroidery work and quickly became hooked on creating oversized pieces, aiming to get her fibre artwork away from the wall. Discover how her chosen textiles give rise to her designs and how she tackles the challenge of getting her textile shapes into a self-supporting form, making them appear almost as other-worldly beings.