Meggan Joy, a Seattle-based artist, has carved for herself a unique path in floral artistry. She creates visual storylines that are just as absorbing as they are visually arresting. Her journey as a floral artist is a lifelong affair, buoyed by her passion for photography that started at a young age. She is also fascinated by flora.
Meggan’s artistic process is a thorough and elaborate affair. It blends photography, set design, and prop building to create almost dreamlike ideas. This is chronicled through her incredible digital collages which take one on a fascinating exploration of the convergences of nature, art, and human experience.
A Self-Taught Mastery of Digital Collage
Primarily a self-taught photographic artist, Meggan’s medium of choice is digital collage. She combines fragments of the natural sciences with her narratives and allegories, intertwining symbols and motifs from art history to create new and surreal imageries. If this piques your imagination, here's more on how flowers are transformed into digital art using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Her staged imagery is simply outstanding. It is created using mostly subject matter grown in her garden. She documents the growth, beauty, and decay of her botanical subjects, capturing thousands of individual photographs of flowers, insects, and other wildlife. And the result is a final image that swarms with life and is layered with hidden details and anecdotes.
Inspiration From Art History and the Natural World
Meggan’s inspiration is drawn from art history and the natural world. She contrasts old ‘rules’ and allegories found in art history with modern situations that surround her. This helps her create a world of her own, with its own rules and limitations.
An art history nerd, Meggan is fascinated by the relevance of artwork from hundreds of years ago. And her work with flowers showcases her connection with the natural world; cultivating her garden and capturing the beauty of the botanicals therein in her unique digital collages.
Subjects From Her Garden Full of Nature’s Marvels
The floral photography artist’s creative process begins in her garden, where she cultivates the very subject matter of her art. As previously noted, she grows varieties of botanicals, observes their growth, documents their beauty, and captures their degeneration and decline. Birds, butterflies, and other living visitors to her garden, also make an appearance in her artistic works.
This is the kind of intimate connection with nature that allows her to fabricate staged imagery that is both teeming with life and layered with secret details and tales. In her works, thousands of individual photographs of flowers, insects, and wildlife are carefully assembled to create final images that practically transport one to a dreamy world.
The Art of Storytelling
Meggan's artwork is not just visually striking but also rich in descriptive depth. Her digital collages, which often incorporate symbols and motifs from art history, permeate her pieces with a feel of timelessness and mystique.
Each of her artworks is, basically, a chapter in a larger story that develops with each new creation. Her fascination with the natural world is not just about capturing its beauty but also about exploring and analyzing the human experience through the lens of nature.
Unique Works of Floral and Digital Art
One of Meggan’s most iconic series is the 'Bloom' series, which features images of flowers seemingly floating in the air, hauntingly stark on a black backdrop. The vivaciousness of the bright flowers against a monochrome background creates a remarkable contrast that is filled with mysteriousness.
In another of her artistic series named 'Battle Cry', she depicts women amid conflict. Here, each figure is comprised of layers of materials derived from the living world derived from opened flowers and powerful bodily poses.
Meggan says about this series:
"Color and texture form each woman’s shape, and from the photographs of once-living individual things, portraits of ethereal beings begin to emerge."
In these figures, she gives a picture of a sense of natural beauty coupled with strength.
Fever Dreams and Floral Fantasies
In one of her latest series, named 'Fever Dreams', Meggan whose artistic works have been displayed in numerous exhibitions earning her recognition, explores the world of these ‘fever dreams,’ where the borders between reality and fantasy fade into oblivion.
This body of work is all about fear, loss, and the prospect of pain. And therein, her photographs, reminiscent of 19th-century botanical illustrations, are still enchanting, depicting flowers, insects, and other creatures suspended mid-air as if caught in a perpetual state of weightlessness.
Other than the intrinsic meanings they hold, these works of art bring audiences into a world where the laws of gravity seem to be suspended and the beauty of nature is distilled into its purest form.
The Power of Visuals
For Meggan, visuals are everything. They are a great way to communicate, especially when and where words fail. She gravitates towards making her thoughts heard through visuals. Thus, her art has not only become a way to share her voice in all forms but also a career
Even still, Meggan's creativity extends beyond photography and digital collage. She is also skilled in prop building, set design, and sewing costumes. She is always keeping her hands on whatever stimulates her interest. You can check out more of her artistic works on her site and social page @meggan.joy.
All the photos by @meggan.joy.
