July 7, 2023
Dear Friends,
The Remembering Meg celebration of my sister Meg's fabric millefiori jewelry and early paintings which had been scheduled for April 2020 was postponed due to the corona virus situation.
I'm currently looking for a place to hold the show in North Carolina in April of 2023. If you'd like to be on the mailing list for information about the show, please let me know. In the meantime, you can see photos and read about Meg's life and work below. Love, Kathleen Hannan
P.S. Please be in touch if you'd like to be notified when there is a date and location for the show.
Dear Friends,
The Remembering Meg celebration of my sister Meg's fabric millefiori jewelry and early paintings which had been scheduled for April 2020 was postponed due to the corona virus situation.
I'm currently looking for a place to hold the show in North Carolina in April of 2023. If you'd like to be on the mailing list for information about the show, please let me know. In the meantime, you can see photos and read about Meg's life and work below. Love, Kathleen Hannan
P.S. Please be in touch if you'd like to be notified when there is a date and location for the show.
Meg Hannan's Life and Work
The idea for this show came to me in the last days of my sister Meg's life. We had the very good fortune to have the support of the wonderful Doctor Khan at Providence St Peter Hospital in Olympia, Washington. He and Meg met before I was able to get out to Olympia, and they loved each other right away. Dr. Khan told me later, "When I came to the door and saw Meg laughing and talking with the aides, I knew I had never met anyone like her in my life." He also told me that he had rarely met anyone so unafraid of death. Meg had found a good home for her beloved kitties to stay together, and after that most important task was completed, she was truly ready to move on, saying
"I'm on the precipice between life and death, and it's a beautiful place to be."
One day when Dr. Khan came to visit he asked Meg about her art. Meg told him that when she was young she had done a lot of large paintings and collages, and that later on she had developed her fabric jewelry, and had continued making that for 30 years. "Everything I learned in making the big paintings is what I continued doing in the jewelry."
I wondered, what did Meg mean by that? I don't know! But the question has stayed with me, and I hope you will come to this show, experience the vast library of Meg's jewelry designs along with some early larger work, and help me ponder that question. Read on for more about Meg's life in fabric, color, form, and laughter. Love, Kathleen
Growing up, Meg was constantly and enthusiastically making beauty out of whatever was at hand. Beading, crocheting, tie dying, sewing, painting on paper, painting on canvas, painting on rocks, collaging, taking and developing photographs, making and nurturing friendships and telling hilarious stories. Even the way she wrapped Christmas presents mystified me. "How does she do that?" I'd wonder, as I used the exact same materials to, well, to not do too much!
Thanks to Meg's friend Danielle, who discovered a long-ago artist's statement as we packed up Meg's things after her death, I now have a window into Meg's understanding of where her art came from.
Here's what she wrote in the late 1980's: "When I was 5 or 6 I used to lie upside down on the the slide in our backyard, big yard, blue sky, head hanging off the edge of the slide, back and down into the grass. I would close my eyes and I would listen to the sound of the world turning. I could hear it, and I would tumble backward into that black weightless space of always was and always will be. That space is at the core of my work. A sensing of eternal in the present. A taste of the actual substance of life and death. A place of watching, threaded through the personal - the experience of the individual, and in that, the one. "
This interests me deeply, the spiritual nature of the understanding that Meg evidently had all her life about the vast eternal source of her work. And perhaps it’s not surprising that someone who had that kind of understanding would embody a creativity and humor that was so expansive, effervescent and unstoppable. As one of her young friends said to me, “Meg was free”.
Not free in every way, certainly. Meg had human limitations like the rest of us. But in the flow of the joy of color and form, Meg was very free, and she honored it, and loved it, and knew that it was as much a gift to her as it was to all of us.
Her same friend Kate Paisley, who grew up with Meg and worked with Meg in her studio,
wrote on the eve of Meg’s death: “When I think about you dearest, a flood of sensations come rushing through...laughing so hard at our own jokes we almost choked, confiding in each other, talking about our childhoods, family, our love lives, astrology, movies, feelings, desires, creative expression…
I remember being bowled over with how much love and attention you paid to the small things. You would pick up a colorful cluster of shredded discarded fiber off the floor and ask "why do I love this so much?!!" And you'd put it on the table and let that be art. Because it is. And I'd just think how cute that was. And I don't know if I learned that from you or if I was just cut from the same cloth.”
Through college and on through her twenties and thirties Meg continued to create... photos, expansive paintings, prints and collages, and then finally, the Fabric Jewels that she invented and shared for 30 years. All around the world there are people wearing Meg's creations, and I know from my own experience that right now someone, somewhere, is saying to one of them, "Wow, that's so beautiful, what is that made of?" That's the question that Meg heard thousands of times.
Her answer: "Rolled and sliced fabric and fibers." She called her work fiber millefiori, after the Italian glass art that is made in a similar way. Cross sectioned, like sushi too. The fabrics and cords were soaked in glue, rolled, and dried till they were very hard. Then they were sliced with a super sharp knife on a very large guillotine-type cutter that Meg and an inventor friend designed. And often Meg adorned her creations with beads, including some fabric beads as below. The result, magic!
Meg sold her work at shows and galleries all over the country, including at the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival, the Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Arts Museum, the Best of the Northwest Art & Fine Craft Show, and for many years, at The International Quilt Festival in Houston Texas, both the retail and wholesale shows. Meet a quilter, and you likely have met someone who knows someone who wears Meg's earrings, pins or pendants.
Her answer: "Rolled and sliced fabric and fibers." She called her work fiber millefiori, after the Italian glass art that is made in a similar way. Cross sectioned, like sushi too. The fabrics and cords were soaked in glue, rolled, and dried till they were very hard. Then they were sliced with a super sharp knife on a very large guillotine-type cutter that Meg and an inventor friend designed. And often Meg adorned her creations with beads, including some fabric beads as below. The result, magic!
Meg sold her work at shows and galleries all over the country, including at the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival, the Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Arts Museum, the Best of the Northwest Art & Fine Craft Show, and for many years, at The International Quilt Festival in Houston Texas, both the retail and wholesale shows. Meet a quilter, and you likely have met someone who knows someone who wears Meg's earrings, pins or pendants.
When I traveled across the country in 2018 in Meg's van bringing her art back to North Carolina with me, I would meet people who asked about one of Meg's pins I was wearing. I would ask them if they'd like to see more designs, and they always said yes. And there, looking through slices by the side of the van, I learned something about art I had never quite understood before. I would watch Meg's wild love of color and form wake up in these strangers' eyes, and suddenly we were no longer strangers, connected in the love that moved through Meg, through her work to us. Magic indeed!
At this show we'll have a chance for folks to sit at tables and touch and marvel over the slices and "end bits" from the vast library of designs that Meg made during those 30 years. There will be early paintings of Meg's as well as a large number of monoprints. And we'll show a few slides of some beautiful paintings that Meg had documented for shows, before selling the pieces long ago.
There will also be monoprints, paintings, and Fabric Jewels for sale, as well as prototype giclee prints of three of my favorite painting/collages of Meg's, Island Flight, Inner Strength and Wide Open Grace, which can be ordered and mailed to you.
When I have a new date for the show I will post it here. Please let me know if
you'd like to be on the email list for the show and celebration of Meg's life. Love, Kathleen
Contact Kathleen to sign up on the email list.
There will also be monoprints, paintings, and Fabric Jewels for sale, as well as prototype giclee prints of three of my favorite painting/collages of Meg's, Island Flight, Inner Strength and Wide Open Grace, which can be ordered and mailed to you.
When I have a new date for the show I will post it here. Please let me know if
you'd like to be on the email list for the show and celebration of Meg's life. Love, Kathleen
Contact Kathleen to sign up on the email list.