As Meaden looked at the chair of her and her partner’s clothes as they “steadily piled up” she began to draw the tumbled still-life before her “in all the little misshapen teardrops, circles and triangles.” The forms, to Meaden, “assembled into grotesque and ungainly tumours—born out of the chair itself.”

Meaden’s paintings have a presence to them. They are fluid shapeshifters. They are forlorn folds, promises, and past lives, shed skins. They are characterful. Colourful and domestic. Personal, and though the pile conceals the chair, they are revealing. A mound of multiple meanings. They are a soft sack of potatoes. They assume a singular form, when viewed at night, a lumpy, hungry chair, an elephant in the room. What might be germinating within the heap, what might be buried beneath? In the personal setting, comprised from little, they hint at the unspoken.

On the closing night of Meaden’s “Immacolata,” the name also which Meaden and her partner call the saddled chair, there is an air of ‘something has happened’. Something is being lived, felt, and processed. There is a feeling of grief. It hangs unseen in the air, but it is there. It has settled on the clothes mound. It has settled on the furniture dotted about the room. Even on the temporarily arranged seating for the audience. And while the audience might not know what has transpired, there is no mistaking the aura in the room. In not labelling what has happened, I am free to lay my own meaning on the work. To perhaps add my own crumpled garment to the yellow chair. To see caution in the movements of the body that hint at injury or illness or sadness or uncertainty or feelings of worth. “Immacolata” is deeply personal, but there is a generosity in how this is slowly revealing itself. And in that space of generosity, I can think about illness and grief and expectations of the body to perform a certain way. As Meaden lets her right arm dangle from the shoulder socket, her arm circles as if independent of the remainder of her body. Not just physically independent, but as if operating in response to commands not from her brain, but from some other control centre. Governed by grief. Steered by wariness. Navigated by absence. Perhaps to the person sat beside me, they saw a personal struggle within their own form as they watched this scene. Perhaps they read this lack of control as a hallmark of illness. A body that refuses to yield to the wishes of the brain and instead operates under a new set of rules. Limbs go wobbly, and steadiness is not a given.