Graduating in 2010 from UniSA's South Australian School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours), Meaghan Coles has since exhibited extensively in group & solo exhibitions in Adelaide & overseas.
Meaghan’s unique practice explores how the female face is objectified within popular advertising. Her paintings are an investigation into the painted, fragmented face, questioning the concept of ideal beauty as portrayed in popular imagery. By taking faces used to promote beauty products in glossy fashion magazines and painstakingly reworking them as unique paintings, Meaghan symbolically restores and invests them with individual identity.
Meaghan states, "I'm fascinated by the way the female face is portrayed in advertising, reduced to a sexualised, superficial object, devoid of human emotion. My work examines the concept of ideal beauty advertisers promote in order to sell their products. My works result as a mere superficial representation of an ideal female beauty that reflects the beauty and fashion industry. The viewer is asked to consider how these faces function when they are taken out of the environment of mass-production and transferred into a fine art context?".
Meaghan primarily uses oil paint & mixed media to push boundaries between realistic techniques & abstraction. Meaghan spent 2013 on artist residency in Europe including one month in Barcelona & ten months in Berlin. While overseas she has furthered her skills in gallery management as well as showcasing her work to the International art scene. More recently she has been awarded the Carclew studio scholarship where she is now practicing in North Adelaide.