The Hands That Feed

Megan Rea

June 9, 2024 - August 4, 2024

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Stellarhighway is excited to present The Hands That Feed by London-based artist Megan Rea. Rea creates paintings on hand-constructed papers that take formal inspiration from Medieval architecture and imagery. Their uneven and shaped surfaces, like weathered frescoes, allow earlier washes to reappear through many layered applications. Envisioning collisions between the real, the imaginary and the reliquary, Rea’s sibylline work plays with ideas of time and space, and pushes into occulted and entangled constructions of self and culture.

For The Hands That Feed, Rea presents a loose map interpreting a family story of buried treasure: her Welsh maternal great-grandfather buried his life savings in the early 1940s to save it from the blitz, but died before he could divulge the location to anyone else. Various family members have guessed as to where it could be, but no one knows for certain and no one in the artist’s family has found it. Through exposure of this narrative, the six paintings in the presentation express a bittersweet union of selfish desire (reaching hands) and selfless hope (wishing trees have sprouted from coins thrown by strangers into fountains) that touches all loss.

Megan Rea (b. 1993; London, UK) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; and Copeland Park in London, UK. Group exhibitions include those at Bloom Galerie, St. Tropez, FR; The Tub, London, UK; and, Studi0, Zurich, CH. Her work has been published twice in Artmaze Magazine. She is also a recipient of the John Kinross Scholarship, an RSA New Contemporaries selected artist, a recipient of the Open Contemporary Young Artist Award, and was shortlisted for the HIX Award. She lives and works in East London.


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