Meghan Stanley is a New York–based ceramic sculpture artist working across small-scale and life-sized forms. She began working with clay at a young age, but her practice deepened in high school, where she received a perfect score on her AP Ceramics portfolio. She is completing her B.F.A. in Ceramics at Indiana University Bloomington and recently presented her Thesis Exhibition with a solo show in New York City. She maintains an active studio practice in Brooklyn while finishing her degree remotely and interning at Greenwich House Pottery. Her work uses clay alongside materials such as silicone, metal, fabric, and paint to explore the body as a site of memory, vulnerability, and physical experience. Through distorted, biomorphic forms and skin-like surfaces, she incorporates elements of body horror and creates sculptures that act as documentations of the body, capturing emotional and physical sensations. Meghan’s practice investigates how touch, material, and intuition converge, building forms that carry their own histories of sensation. Along with clay and sculpture, she pursues other areas of interest such as painting, mixed-media, writing, guitar, fashion, and collecting.

Our bodies are an archive of memories, storing them within flesh and bone. When I relive these moments, I feel them throughout my body. I feel tenderness in my thumbs when I rubbed my first love’s cheek, heartache in my chest from my mother’s absence, and grief carried in my spine and abdomen from sexual assault. Memories from my girlhood and womanhood live in my skin: ribbons from bows tied in my hair, the lace curtains my grandma gave me, wearing my mother’s pearls. These sensations, however painful or sweet, are reminders that we exist and feel, hurt, and love. Our bodies hold everything. Through clay, which holds memory and traces of touch, I give form to these experiences. I combine amalgamations of flesh to create a new body of sensation—a form that preserves connection. Hurt and love are never in one fixed place; sensation shifts differently in each of us. This new body gathers where I have felt these emotions, merging them into a single sensory creature of lived experience. My forms are an exploration of my touch, guidance, and vulnerability. I allow the clay to fold in on itself and build from its decisions as much as my own; we work as partners. Through this process, I investigate surface and the internal tension of clay as it pushes back against my fingers, creating a shared negotiation of control. I remain in conversation with the material, responding to how it bends, collapses, and holds, allowing it the same agency it allows me. My clay holds my memories and is a sweet reminder that we are here–we are alive.

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