Shadow-makers: Meagan Streader

Shadow-makers presents a new body of work by Meagan Streader, developed during her residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris earlier this year. Intersecting art, architecture and design, the exhibition showing at MARS Gallery continues Streader’s inquiries into the transformative potential of light. Working with copper, iridescent polyester, LEDs and rudimentary electrical circuits, the exhibition explores states of connection and balance through a series of suspended mobiles and wall-based sculptures. Within each work, illuminated elements are held in delicate equilibrium – a slight movement can interrupt the flow of electricity, or reinstate it. 

Developed between Paris and Melbourne, the works translate observations gathered across these cities into a shared sculptural language. Architectural fragments such as tile motifs, grids, shadows, light phenomena, reflective surfaces, structures and the changing scale of each city, alongside personal experiences, memories, and artworks encountered, are translated and transcribed. These details are distilled into constructions of line, woven light, reflection and balancing elements. The works carry these observations between cities, where they take on new scale and material form, evoking the way light interacts with the city’s architecture, monuments, and night-time atmosphere.

This process of translation also extends to the modernist references that inform the works. In Shadow-makers, Streader simultaneously draws from pioneering figures in 20th century architecture, art and design – particularly women. The works of Chryssa, Eileen Gray, Agnes Martin, Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Lygia Pape (among others) inspire the compositions of Streader’s pieces. Each sculpture takes a particular reference from one of these pioneers as its point of departure. Their approaches to geometry, repetition, textile and spatial perception have been reworked into new sculptural arrangements, shaping the forms and spatial relationships of Streader’s works.

Light, reflection and shadow extend each construction into the room, shifting as viewers move around each piece. Streader’s restrained sculptures honour the forms, ideas and legacies of a lineage of female pioneers whose spatial interventions pushed the boundaries of architectural discourse.