Artist profile — Meghan Cooney

By Ant Perrucci

Meghan Cooney, 29 is Drift’s Artist of the Month. A native of Falls Church, Va., Cooney has lived in St. Augustine for five years. A 2007 graduate of Flagler College, Cooney is big on art, welding and somebody’s trash into someone else’s objets d’art.

Drift: How did you get started in the art world?
Meghan Cooney: I started doing photography, and then I went from there. I started going to school for art (because) I had a friend that was in art school. She was like, ‘Go study art! It’s really fun,’ so I was like, ‘OK.’ First I was studying photography, but when I came down to Flagler, they didn’t have a photo program, so I switched over [to sculpture].

D: What media do you work in?
MC: Most of my sculptures are in metal, and I really enjoy welding. It’s a lot of fun to be able to manipulate metal like that. Since I graduated I’ve started working in plastic, like with plastic grocery bags.

D: Do you have any favorite pieces that you’ve worked on?
MC: I guess that would be like asking me if I had a favorite child. They’re all different and they’re all special to me, I guess. I don’t know that I’d necessarily have a favorite.
Definitely I prefer sculpture to any other method.

D: You have a couple of pieces installed outside of Simple Gestures. Are those examples of found art?
MC: The ones that were made out of bicycles, those were bicycles that were [ridden] around town, they obviously had a life before they were sculptures. They were, you know, bicycles. I really like found art. There’s something really interesting about taking something that was trash and turning it into art. Some of the things that I’ve been doing most recently, that’s all found, random pieces of paper or pictures or whatever.

D: But do you prefer sculptures to 2-D works?
MC: I always hated drawing or anything like that, it just sounded so boring. [Laughs] I really like to do something where you could be constantly getting hurt.

D: How so?
MC: Well, I like welding, you know, welding’s not dangerous, but it’s not drawing with a pencil. It’s using electricity and I cut all those pieces apart to make them what they are now. And those plastic bags that are at Simple Gestures, they came together so much more quickly than any 2-D work I’d ever done. You know?

If I wanted to weld a piece together, I just hold it, weld it and it’s done. I can move onto the next step in the process. As opposed to just, you know, making a line with a paintbrush and waiting for it to dry or shading with a pencil on a drawing I’ve worked on for hours. It’s just a lot more exciting for me.

D: What are your future plans?
MC: My future plans for art are just to keep finding things that could be trash and giving them a new life.

D: Where do you draw inspiration from?
MC: I think more of my inspiration comes from life than from another artist. Like with the bicycles, I took my inspiration from their life before they were trash. So I sort of take my inspiration from what they’re going to be than from what’s been done before me.

[Pause] My teachers would be pissed if I said that.

D: Why?
MC: Because, we were – you know. We were always studying other artists. I don’t know, they would just think it’s a lazy answer, I guess. To not give you a name.