The Artist
I paint the places where myth and ordinary life overlap. My work grows out of the rural North Canterbury landscape, where paddocks, rivers, floodplains and engineered water systems carry their own histories and tensions. Myth moves through those places rather than sitting apart from them: the Minotaur, the labyrinth and the watchers appear as part of a landscape shaped by memory, pressure and human intervention.
Meg Maguire is a New Zealand painter and writer based in rural North Canterbury. Her work brings mythology into the contemporary landscape, drawing on the Minotaur, the labyrinth, watchers and older stories alongside the particular histories and pressures of the land around her.
Her practice is informed by an ongoing interest in mythology, archaeology and art history, but also by close observation of the ordinary landscape: paddocks, rivers, floodplains, irrigation systems and the traces left by people trying to shape and control them. Increasingly, the distinction between landscape and symbol has become less certain; each begins to carry something of the other.
Maguire has exhibited regularly throughout Canterbury and received the Eastside Development Award for The Conversation. Her work is held in private collections in New Zealand and Australia.
Alongside her painting, she writes Labyrinth Notes, an ongoing body of essays and studio writing that follows many of the stories, ideas and questions that move through the paintings.