Merill Comeau: From conception to creation

Merill Comeau creates installations, murals and garments. She uses the concept of disruption and reordering to build stories exploring memory, repair, regeneration and women’s experiences. Merill makes comment on societal expectations for sexual and emotional expression in her work. Her pieced fabric compositions explore historical and contemporary women’s roles such as the toil of the maker, the privilege of the wearer, the job of mothering and how to be a ‘good’ daughter.

Merill has shown her art in over seventy exhibitions including at the Danforth Museum of Art, the Fuller Museum of Craft and the Fitchburg Museum of Art. She has facilitated over thirty collaborative community art projects and has received grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Covenant Foundation.

Merill has received residencies three times at the Weir Farm National Historic Site in Connecticut. She has also completed residencies at Hambidge Center for Art and Science in Georgia, Acadia National Park in Maine, Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland and the Vermont Studio Center. In addition, she lectures about fibre art in a post-modern context, creates work in healing groups and social justice communities and provides demonstrations of her techniques.

In this interview, read about how Merill drew upon memories of her childhood and her mother’s influence to create an installation titled ‘Family of Origin’, which explores universal themes including trying to make sense of our lives and the influence of our family. In this work, she stitched together snippets of fabric to represent the re-ordering and retelling of childhood narratives and the mending of wounds.