Megan Soul is a Norwich and Bedfordshire-based painter whose practice emerges from ideas of intimacy, the ephemeral and vulnerability, exploring these as concepts to be materialised. Drawing from personal and internal experience, their works attempt to give form to the ineffable and fleeting through painting.
Working in watered down acrylics and diluted oil paint, their works utilise chance effects to achieve mottled, hazy appearances, echoing the transient nature of memory. Soul often paints themselves, using their image as a repository for ideas of the personal made public. Applying thin washes of colour, Soul stains and blurs imagery, concealing and revealing the face and figure. Driven by a desire to externalise internal experience and feeling, they highlight vulnerability as a powerful state rather than a flawed condition.
The paintings are often displayed with extensions of raw canvas fabric, introducing a spatial element to their works. This broadens and enhances form and serves as a motif, foregrounding the physical painting structure as a contrast to the more transitory subject matter.