Megan Salter
Fine Art BA (Hons)
University of Wolverhampton
Specialisms: Fine Art / Drawing / Painting
Location: Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
Megan Salter
First Name: Megan
Last Name: Salter
Specialisms: Fine Art / Drawing / Painting
Sectors:
My Location: Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
University / College: University of Wolverhampton
Course / Program Title: Fine Art BA (Hons)
About
Hi, im megan a fine artist from wolverhampton university.
My work is focused on investigating the crossover of femininity, desire, and transgression through mixed media paintings.I aim to explore how fruit, crochet and monstrous women can be symbolic of sexuality, power and social anxieties surrounding patriarchal power and women’s desires. Through these paintings, I investigate ways in which female sexuality is simultaneously celebrated and feared.
Within my fruit paintings and my crochet , I focus on objects that resemble female form- the vagina, reproductive organs, and functions etc... whether they be decaying, bruised, leaking or hanging. These variates forms are metaphors of fertility, temptation, eroticism, and sexuality. Their soft, delicate surfaces offer suggestions of sensuality and weakness whilst their imperfections and resemblance to women’s features hints to transgression, the uncanny and sexualisation. The fruit and the yarn acts as a symbol of the social anxieties surrounding women’s bodies, desire, and femininity. Alongside these, I create realistic paintings of monstrous women combining beauty, strength, eroticism, and horror. These women are purposely meant to be both alluring and unsettling, mimicking the tension between cultural ideals and anxieties surrounding women. Their features, gaze and monstrous attributes highlight sexuality, identity, power, and fear altogether: these figures challenge viewers preconceptions and original thoughts- revealing the truth of transgression, desire and societal control and normality. My goal within my work is to portray the monstrous feminine as something not inherently horrific and terrifying but as something complex, confusing but compelling and alluring. Like the taboo subject of women’s bodies, power, and identity, by combining fruits or crochet and female form, my paintings convey vitality, resilience and sensuality whilst also questions societal dynamics and patriarchy. At heart, my work invites people to reflect on potency of femininity, its seduction, its beauty, its ability to be uncanny or uncomfortable but to also inhibit the transformative power of desire and sexuality.
This work explores the monstrous feminine through painted female forms entwined with wool, using softness to stage unease. Wool becomes flesh, wound, and hair—stitched, tangled, and erupting from bodies to suggest excess, transformation, and threat. Painting anchors the figure in art-historical traditions of femininity, while the textile disrupts it, pushing the body beyond containment. These hybrid surfaces evoke myth, abjection, and the grotesque, reclaiming monstrosity as power rather than pathology. By merging craft and paint, the work challenges ideals of beauty and control, presenting the feminine as unstable, generative, and defiantly unruly.
These oil paintings explore mythological female figures, Medusa and Lilith, as embodiments of the monstrous feminine. Historically portrayed as threatening or transgressive, these figures are reimagined as complex symbols of power, autonomy and transformation. They rebel and refuse submission in each of their own ways, challenging the monstrous expectations put on women
Within these pieces, the monstrous feminine is explored through fruits- conveying forms that mimic the female body or their functions. Within the first trilogy of paintings,the fruit being cut in half becomes a ‘portal’ into a world that is often hidden or taboo. By mixing both images of fruit and symbolism of anatomy, the artwork challenges viewers to think about what is natural or unsettling about the pieces and the real female body. The digital series ‘states of Venus’ depict a fragmented female body floating in darkness, where the torso is replaced by a ruptured lemon spilling its interior. Referencing Venus, the work transforms a symbol of ideal beauty into something acidic and unsettling. The exposed fruit-like body suggests bitterness, abjection, and the monstrous feminine, where femininity becomes excessive, unstable, and resistant to traditional ideals of sweetness and perfection.