Megan Hanley

Region: Pacific Coast

In the summer of 2016, I received a Mary Ausplund Tooze Scholar Travel Award to participate in a three-week dig with the Sanisera Archaeology Institute in Menorca, Spain. While unearthing a necropolis of approximately 1,500-year-old Roman tombs, I was inspired to create a series of life-size ink and charcoal drawings depicting the vitality of the shrubs, grasses, and flowers reclaiming the graves post-excavation. The Necropolis 6 series signifies the cyclical nature of life, the fact that through death the body transitions from one that consumes to one that provides nourishment. In this process, the matter of the body merges with that of nonhuman organisms, dispelling the hierarchy of dominance developed by Western man. My goal is to generate art that continues a dialogue with posthumanist theory and explores how acts of entombment and excavation affect the land and embody the interconnected relationship we humans have with the environment.