Transforming space and dreaming new realities: Meagan Streader

People | Emma-Kate Wilson

2 Aug 2023

By employing light in her sculptural installations, Meagan Streader plays with perception through intersecting forms and glowing hues.

Meagan Streader

Image: Anne Moffat

With her installations, Melbourne-based artist Meagan Streader considers the social and built environments to foster experiences of warmth and collective energy.

“[Light] can affect mood, be immersive or minimal, can be subtle or blinding – influencing the mind and body into feeling a range of sensations,” Streader explains.

After graduating from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane with a Bachelor of Fine Arts/Visual Arts in 2010, Streader became interested in how she might transform space and dream new realities. “This spilled into installation and sculpture, which eventually led me to experiment with light and its effects, and how these materials responded to surrounding architecture and viewers present,” Streader says.

Mediating between two desires (pink) (2022), an artwork made from acrylic, textured glass and COB LEDs.

In 2015, Streader embarked on a three-month residency in New York City, where she was exposed to minimalist and light-and-space artists like James Turrell, Dan Flavin, Stephen Antonakos and Mary Corse. Four years later, after a stint assembling and wiring high-end light fittings for architectural and commercial projects, Streader launched her full-time art career. Her intuitive process directs light with a never-ending material palette of LEDs, fluorescents, lasers, electroluminescent tape, glass, acrylic and neon.

The magic of Streader’s oeuvre is most clearly seen when the installations incorporate natural light. For example, in Broken Hills (2020) at the Junction Mine on Barkandji Country, Streader carefully positions her work to juxtapose it with the setting or rising sun. The sculpture’s soft pink peaks evoke the natural palette beyond. And in the immersive, site-specific installation Slow Rinse (2019) at Dark Mofo, Streader transformed a warehouse into a vision of intersecting light beams. She describes the epic-in-scale artwork as a calming and mesmerizing respite from the more hedonistic sensory overload of the festival.

For “Melbourne Now,” at the National Gallery of Victoria, Streader refined her investigations with a new large-scale installation titled Sky Whispers. The work will be 21 metres long by 8 metres high, reflecting the area where light plays through and across the building’s windows and geometric architecture.

Inviting a sense of wonder that visually and physically engages audiences with her art, Streader, who is represented by MARS Gallery, takes viewers into a place of light phenomena, phenomenology and space. And with a process centred on exploration, we are left to imagine what might be possible.

Most inspiring space you’ve been to? Dia Beacon in NY was a breathtaking paradise for minimalism and light art for me.

What would be your dream project? A permanent, immersive light installation on Japan’s art island Naoshima.

It’s your ultimate design dinner party – which four guests are you inviting? Dan Flavin, Luis Barragan, Do Ho Suh and Roni Horn – for a mix of contemporary and historical powerhouses exploring light, architecture, material, time, memory, perception and space.