Megan Powell - Get Stabbed and Boogie

For her solo exhibition at PAPER, photographer, Megan Powell, presents an ongoing body of work that presents a narrative of survival following an attempted murder.

In Get Stabbed and Boogie, the viewer learns that the masked figure within the photographs is in reality, the artist. She is depicted inebriated and dancing in a state of rapture, having undergone reconstructive surgery to her face following a recent stabbing. She is bloody and bandaged, captured and processed through her own lens. These photographic images mark the artist’s singular recovery, transforming a moment of violence into artifice and decoration.

Get Stabbed and Boogie is built around a framework of dark humour. It attempts to find reciprocity within the isolation of a particular incident whilst exploring the aftermath of traumatic experience. Within the works the viewer is presented with pious nuns alongside fragmented female body parts in order to depict the archetypal biblical narrative of Madonna versus whore. These subjective binaries of representations of women and constructs of desire and control are at the centre of Megan’s work, whilst sitting alongside these images of rapture, sexuality, and religious devotion is the artist, Peter Kennard. Kennard, Powell’s tutor at the Royal College of Art and long-time friend, is presented as her mentor and inspiration. He represents figure of humility and openness, the portraits create an exchange between the two artists and a celebration of his fifty years of producing meaningful artwork. 

Powell’s output is one of exchange and encounter, and draws upon the vulnerabilities and responsibilities of trauma, post-trauma and process, as a means to exploring empathy, tenderness, freedom, and the power of play.