Bio

Meg Maguire is a New Zealand-based figurative painter whose work explores quiet reckonings — the emotional weight of memory, mythology, and survival.

Working primarily in oil, Meg’s paintings often place solitary figures within symbolic, coastal, or elemental spaces. Her visual language draws from ancient myth, ecological grief, and the quiet insistence of what remains.

Based in North Canterbury, Meg paints from her home studio while also operating a rural bus business. Her background in visual merchandising and lifelong interest in literature inform her compositional clarity and narrative tone.

Meg has exhibited across Canterbury, including a solo show at the Christchurch Arts Centre and selection for the Arts Canterbury Juried Exhibition. In 2025, her work The Conversation was awarded a development prize and forms the conceptual anchor for her current series Drowned Worlds.

She is particularly interested in themes of witness, ritual, and spiritual recovery — and how mythology can be used not to escape our present moment, but to return to it more clearly.

 Statement

I paint quiet reckonings.
My work explores what remains — after grief, after myth, after collapse.

I work in oil, slowly, using solitary figures and symbolic elements to hold space for memory, loss, and the emotional undercurrents of survival. Many of my paintings take place at the edge of land and sea — liminal spaces where meaning is fragile, layered, or partially erased.

I’m drawn to mythology not for escape, but for its clarity: a way to speak plainly about spiritual weight, ecological witness, and what we carry forward. My recent work engages with the Minotaur as a symbol of both destruction and truth ignored — not a monster, but a mirror.

These are not loud paintings. They are insistent.

Artist CV

Education:

  • 2023: Diploma in Creativity, The Learning Connexion School of Creativity, Wellington, New Zealand.
  • 2022: Certificate in Creativity, The Learning Connexion School of Creativity, Wellington, New Zealand.
  • 1992: Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology and Religious Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.


Selected Exhibitions:


2025


  • Eastside Spring Exhibition, Eastside Gallery, Linwood
  • Kaiapoi Art Expo, Kaiapoi
  • Arts Canterbury Juried Exhibition, Eastside Gallery Linwood


2024


  • Arts Canterbury Juried Exhibition, Oxford, New Zealalnd


2023


  • Sole Exhibition "The Watcher" The Arts Centre, Christchurch


Awards


  • Development Award - Arts Canterbury Juried Exhibition 2025