Megan Mosholder works with the basic elements of design - line, shape and color - but the true star of the show is light.

Mosholder’s parabolic, site-specific, sculptural installations augment and reinvent the spaces that they occupy. Through the use of paracord and UV sensitive paints, these web-like structures come alive as the sun goes down.

Beginning her career as a high school teacher, Mosholder decided to change focus to concentrate on becoming a full-time artist. In our conversation, Mosholder recounts her time as a student, a teacher, an artist assistant and a working artist who has earned high level commissions by corporations like Microsoft and Google. In 2018, a tragic car accident burned over 60% of her body, forcing her to endure a medically induced coma, over 30 surgeries and an amputation. Mosholder had to learn how to navigate the world in a new way - but with the same grit, determination, and wonder that she has always approached her work, eventually landing a coveted exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Jon Witzky: I'm going through your work and it's amazing, the trajectory that you've been on. I feel like your ideas were fully formed from the very beginning – I’m thinking of pieces like the wrapped rocks at SCAD’s Lacoste campus [400 Wrapped Rocks – Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France, 2011].

Megan Mosholder: Yeah, that was my first major installation.

JW: It's really beautiful and simple – quite lovely.

MM: Yeah, that came out of meeting Teresita Fernández [visual artist and sculptor known for large scale public works]. She was at Lacoste when I was there, and she pushed me out of my comfort zone. I was still trying to make some form of paintings and she said, “You're not a painter, you’re a sculptor, and you're working way too small.” And I was making these four by eight foot paintings. And I was like, “That's small?” She was like, “Way too small.”

JW: Did you end up working as her assistant in Brooklyn?

MM: I did. SCAD allowed me to transfer into the remote eLearning program, essentially, so I could finish my degree while working with her in Brooklyn. And it was phenomenal.

JW: What were you doing for her?

MM: She was working out of her garage and she had me smashing rocks on the concrete floor with a hammer that we were then bleaching to make this fool's gold look like actual gold. It was for the piece that she installed at the Louis Vuitton in Shanghai. [Teresita Fernández: Yellow Mountains – Louis Vuitton Shanghai, Shanghai, China, November 30, 2011.]

It's like ten thousand rocks with ten thousand little hooks attached to the rocks hanging from ten thousand gold chains.

JW: That was your education.

MM: That was my education. She also had me doing things like taping straws together and she would send me to the art supply store to get colored pencils. And she'd say, “Don’t tell them who it’s for.” I wouldn't say she's secretive, but I guess she’s cautious about who knows what she's doing.

JW: Sure, all artists have their secrets – there's got to be some mystery left in our work! How long did you work with her?

MM: I ended up working with her for eight months. And then I ended up working with a performance artist, Nadja Verena Marcin. I traveled with her to a residency in upstate New York to help her dye this iconic waterfall that was actually in a Turner painting while her boyfriend helped set up the large format camera and she dressed up like a Native American to reenact that painting by Turner.

When she interviewed me she asked, “You're still in graduate school?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And she's like, “Why are you so old?” As only a German would do, because the Germans are just so blunt. And I was like, “Because it just took me a while to get to my MFA I guess. I took the long, roundabout way to do that work.”

JW: I think that's the best way, though – I often feel for really young people who are getting their MFA – it’s hard to make work when you haven't even had a chance to have a life yet.

MM: Well, and you're also going to be really heavily influenced by everything around you. When I started my master’s program at SCAD, I had already been a high school teacher previously, so I was relating to my professors as colleagues – and I don't think they really liked that because I was supposed to be a starry-eyed grad student. I think I was jaded by the time I got to SCAD.

Because the whole point of grad school is to create a body of work to be able to use for applications. And then, of course, you’ve got to maintain that momentum if you want to keep getting opportunities. On my first day on the job with Teresita, she goes, “Wait, you moved here? Do you know how many thousands of people are out there trying to do what you're trying to do?” She was like, “You need to live in a place that's really inexpensive so you can put everything towards your work, especially straight out of grad school.”

And she was right. There's no way – you know, I'd probably still be a bartender, or maybe I'd be teaching high school again if I had stayed in Brooklyn.

I mean, I love New York City. I think that New York is the first place I felt truly normal because there's so many creatives. Everybody's an artist or a musician or an actor. But it's just a really hard place to survive.

JW: I saw somewhere you had referenced ‘The Poetics of Space,’ which is a wonderful book by Bachelard. What is your thought about the meaning of the landscape? The meaning of space?

MM: You know, I feel like ‘The Poetics of Space’ is a graduate school mainstay, right? But I was just really taken with it.

I've always said it was about the space between the strings, not the strings themselves. I want my audience to see and acknowledge their surroundings. I often build things above people's heads – I want people to look up. People spend a lot of time looking down – especially now that we have these phones – and they don't see their surroundings.

As artists, we’re trained to see things the way regular people are not. So we notice minute idiosyncrasies and changes in color or detail. And I guess I'm trying to do that for the average person, get them to slow down and look at what they're seeing and pay attention.

I've always said that I don't make work about myself. You know, I just build it. It's not about me, and I never wanted it to be about me – it’s about the people experiencing it.

JW: It's really generous for an artist to say “Here, I'm making this for you to have your own experience with – to have your own understanding.”

You’ve said that historically, your work hasn’t been about you – but then you really confronted your own experience in ‘Trial by Fire,’ which you have referred to as a self-portrait.

MM: So I came out of this catastrophic accident, and everybody kept saying, “Oh, I can't wait to see how this influences your work.” Which really irritated me – almost pissed me off because I was like, “I don't make work about myself – why would I start now? I'm still the same person.” Then I had an opportunity at Mint in Atlanta, and I was like – what the fuck – let's just build a self-portrait, rip that Band-Aid off and get it over with so people will stop bugging me about it.

I think that's an interesting piece to mention, especially in regard to what I am working on right now. In that one, I included all these charred elements – I was pointing to the beauty in the decrepit. I was trying to articulate for myself what my current situation was – how it influenced me. One of the reasons why we become artists is because we have things inside us that cannot be expressed with words. We have to make it visual because we're visual people.

And sometimes you have things inside yourself that need to come out so you can heal and move forward. So that was the beginning of me trying to articulate what had happened to me.

JW: You talk about the idea of art as a mechanism for healing. In an interview that I read, you were talking about people in Ukraine protecting their landmarks and how that kind of opened your eyes to the importance of art. [ARTS ATL: “Artist Megan Mosholder soars above tragedy to exhibit at Venice Biennale.” Gail O’Neill, April 28, 2022].

MM: Yeah, I think at that time I was grappling with the idea of what I was investing my time in and I was thinking: Is this the best use of my time when there are so many people out there hurting and struggling? Then I saw that the Ukrainians were wrapping their cultural objects in foam to protect them from the bombing. We’ve seen over the years in wars that the people often take measures to protect art objects. That was a reaffirmation to me that I was doing the right thing, that what I was making and what I am doing is important and can potentially be important to more than just me.

JW: Yes, absolutely. Going back to what you were saying earlier, that you never made work about yourself; the reality is, it's always about yourself to a degree.

MM: Yeah, you're right.

JW: But to embrace that and recognize the universality of the experience is important. The piece that you made for the Venice Biennale, ‘Leteralle’…

MM: That was something that I originally built in New York, in Brooklyn, and then rebuilt in Venice. It was an excellent piece. Being there for the opening was pretty powerful, I really love watching people interact with the work. I actually got a video of this little boy who was dancing around in the room – he paused to look at it, and I said, “You can go inside of it.”

And he turned to look at his parents to make sure it was okay. And I was like, “Yeah, go ahead.” And so he went up and he danced inside of it. And, you know, I love it when that type of thing happens, you know, that's the impact I'm looking for. I want to take people outside of themselves for a moment.

JW: That’s a beautiful image in my mind, of the child dancing in there.

MM: Yeah. Well, I had some adults dancing in there, too, which was kind of hilarious because they're dancing on top of this horrific sequence – but kind of funny, right? Because, you know, I guess that's how I choose to look at it. I try to look at my perpetual recovery with a sense of lightheartedness, because otherwise it's just too heavy and it’ll pull you down.

JW: I think the fact that you had that work to do and that you had the mindset to be able to enter into that, is really incredible.

MM: It definitely helped me heal. I don't do well when I don’t work.

In Venice, I was struggling with pain and exhaustion and spending more time in bed. And I thought, you know, this is a really expensive trip to be in bed all the time. Like, I can't even go out. Even though Lucas [Mosholder’s studio assistant], like I mentioned earlier, would bring cappuccinos and cannoli and stuff to me in bed, which was amazing.

When I came home, I kind of crashed and I had the realization that I am disabled. This is not going to go away. This is how my life is now. And although I believe that I will eventually get rid of this wheelchair, it's just taking so much longer than I had hoped. That was a really hard realization to come to, and I plummeted. I nose-dived. At the same time I was living in this apartment in Smyrna while my studio was in Grant Park, and I'm not currently driving and couldn't really afford to keep taking cars back and forth because it's so expensive and even trying to use Marta to get out there was just too much.

So I wasn't making anything. And I really believe that true artists, when they don't make work, they get sick because all that stuff is trapped inside of you. You know, you got to get it out. And sometimes it just helps to cover yourself in paint and make a mess right? Just make stuff.

So I ended up moving into a bigger apartment in Smyrna with a garage attached. Now my whole apartment is pretty much a studio space and I’m much happier. I can wake up and tinker in my pajamas if I want to make stuff.

JW: What are you working on now?

MM: Right now I'm currently building for a show at Eyedrum that’s opening April 8th, and I decided to bring on a collaborator – David Clifton-Strawn. He's actually the photographer who took the billboard picture for SPANKBOX. He's awesome. I met him because he was doing a studio project where he was shooting artists and he just made me so comfortable that I showed him some of my scars. I think he took a really powerful photograph of me.

To be clear SPANKBOX is not my project – it’s a project created by performance artist Jessica Blinkhorn, who is a quadriplegic, I would say. I’m not sure she considers herself to be a quad or not. She has a rare form of muscular dystrophy. She was born with it, and the doctors told her she would die when she was in her thirties. She's now in her forties, and she's just one of those spitfire people – she's fierce. She created SPANKBOX as a way to have a conversation about disabled sexuality because she – I guess a number of people asked her if she had sex, right? And she was like, “Of course I do.” Like, that's a basic human need. Everybody does. So as a way to encourage visibility for disabled people, she asked specific people to have their photograph taken.

JW: Ok, very important work.

MM: Right. So, David Clifton-Strawn and I have been working on a piece with a Shibari artist, and they have been tying me up in neon rope and lighting me with black light to create a series of photographs to express my frustration. I've always been incredibly independent, I do everything myself. And now – I had to admit that I need help - and that was really hard to do. “I don't need help. What are you talking about? I can do all the things myself.” But now it's different, I definitely need help, and that's a way of expressing my frustration.

I was talking with Gillian [Gillian Anne Renault] from ARTS ATL, and she was like, “So are you a performance artist now?” I've always hated performance art! I think most of it is obnoxious. It's like people get up there and they're like, “Look, I'm naked. It's art.” You know? I feel like that only really flies in a space where being naked is taboo.

But I think that this conversation is about disability – and specifically about visibility. I don't think that people see disability – and I think one of the reasons is that the world is not set up for disabled people to easily navigate it, so they don't leave their houses. So you don't see a whole lot of wheelchairs.

JW: That's powerful. Can you explain what Shibari is?

MM: It is a Japanese bondage style. It was originally created by samurai, but I don't know why. I don't know why the samurai started tying people up, but they did. And it is just really beautifully executed.

My project isn't about sex. My project is about my physical disability and my immobility – and maybe it is a little about sex too, because I haven't been intimate with anyone since before my accident, because my body is so changed and disfigured, and I'm still learning how to get used to it myself.

I think the act of getting naked in front of a bunch of people who are then tying me up has helped me to conceptualize what it's like to be in the public eye and expose more of my body and my scar tissue. Previous to that, I was always running around in miniskirts and in heels.

But then it changed because, like it's been hard for me to look at because it's just so – I mean, I was burned over 60% of my body. What wasn't burned was cut off and then put on the burnt part. I mean, it's pretty epic. Like they had to cut muscle away. Then they were going to take both my legs above the knee, which I'm really glad they didn't do. They didn't expect me to live.

When I first came home from the hospital, I was sitting in the shower – I had to bathe to get the bandages off because they would adhere to the scabs – and it just hurt. I would sit in the shower and just rivers of blood would come off my body. Pretty intense.

JW: Yeah. Very.

MM: Yeah. I actually just started seeing an acupuncturist, and she's helping me process the trauma. Because I don't remember the car fire. All I remember is getting in the car and then waking up in Grady Hospital like a month later, which I wasn’t totally cognizant of that either, because I was on so many drugs.

JW: I read that you had times where you were hallucinating in the hospital.

MM: Oh yeah. I thought my doctors and nurses were having parties in the room next door. I could hear them snorting lines and stuff. And my mom would come see me, and I was like, “they were partying all night, mom.” And of course she’d go and talk to the head nurse and she’d be like, “Um, no,” you know, “we didn't do that.” They also nicknamed me Houdini because I was constantly pulling tubes out of my body. I was like, “I'm leaving. I'm getting out of here. I don't want to be here anymore.” And they literally had to strap me to the bed because I was trying to escape.

I used to drift in and out, and I'd come back to whomever was visiting with me and I'd say, “I'm sorry. I was traveling.” It was wild. At one point, I had this kind of circular vision where within the circle, I could see what was actually happening. But in the periphery there was some totally different thing happening.

It was really weird. I mean, I was on ketamine, fentanyl, opioids – all the drugs.

JW: Okay. Wow. So yeah. Is that what was causing that hallucinatory experience?

MM: Absolutely. I was in a medically induced coma, too. I think that's important to note, because, I mean, I had just incredible dreams – brought on by the hallucinations, I’m sure. It was just wild. I was seeing demons lurking in the shadows that were trying to get me. It was nuts.

And nowadays I'm trying to sit with burn survivors at Grady as a way to help them with their recovery. And, you know, some of them are telling me some crazy shit and I tell the nurses, “they said this is happening.” And they're like, “Oh, no, that's not happening. They're just hallucinating.” I'm like, “Yep, got it.”

Sorry. That was a lot, huh?

JW: Well, I didn't want to bring this stuff up if you didn't want to talk about it. But I really appreciate hearing what you have to say.

MM: I don't mind talking about it, because I think that through talking about it with other people – I mean, I've had so many people tell me that my recovery has inspired them with whatever struggles they were dealing with, and are dealing with or have dealt with. You know what I mean? So, you know, I feel like it's larger than me. It's definitely a part of my narrative now. Gillian from ARTS ATL wanted to know if I was concerned people were going to know me more from my accident than my art. And I was like, you know, I feel like it all kind of ties in, literally. I think that the accident is something that will always be there, obviously, but will start to lose volume. It won't be the thing that pops up first, if that makes sense, because I don't intend to stop working.

JW: I think it's really beautiful, the different ways that you're approaching things post-accident, there's just something really important about the work that you're doing.

MM: Thank you.

JW: But it isn't foreign to what you were doing before, you know? It’s like, you’re the same person - in fact, maybe, it even feels like it's becoming more monumental.

MM: Mm hmm. Thank you. Yes, that's something that I've always said. I'm still the same person, I'm just enhanced, I guess.

But it's been interesting. I feel like my community in some ways has had more trouble accepting it than I have, because they're used to this certain type of Megan. Like when I moved down to Atlanta from New York, I started wearing stilettos – this is a stiletto town – and my stiletto days are over. I don't know that my short skirt days are over, but definitely the stilettos.

I don't see me wearing four and a half inch heels ever again. And I'm okay with that. But in some ways it was harder for other people to deal with my accident than it has been for me. And maybe that's just because of the type of person I am – I'm not one to dwell on things.

I’ve always battled depression. And one of my ways of tackling depression is, you know, you’ve got to pick your ass up and keep going. You know, you’ve got to move. I think what's different now is I'm more kind to myself in that sometimes you just need a day to just be horizontal, watch a bunch of dumb movies, and then the next day you get up and go back to work. But never stop moving. It's like when people retire and they die three years later.

JW: Right.

MM: You know, it's like they've been busting their ass their whole life and now they're done, and the body’s like, “okay, we're done too.”

JW: Yeah, I know. I mean, like you said earlier about artists when you stop making, you get sick.

MM: Have you ever experienced that?

JW: Oh yeah, many times. Last year was so intense, there was so much work that needed to be done, that when it ended I was like, oh god. My body could feel it. It was like there was this illness that had been hiding in my body, waiting to come out all year.

MM: Right! Well and then sometimes you're like, “What is wrong with me?” And you're like, Oh, I haven't rested in like three months. Like, no wonder. Right?

JW: Can you talk a bit about the importance to you of creating a team?

MM: Hmm. I think that when I'm trying to build a team to make something, I'm trying to find personalities that gel well together, because a lot of what they have to do is be really on top of one another. And if you hate the person you're working next to it's not going to work. Also, I need them to be able to understand what I'm doing as an artist in a way that they can make informed decisions on their own.

The Google piece was really complicated. It was during quarantine. We were in Pittsburgh and – it was cute – some of my assistants had never seen snow before! So we had a snowstorm and they were ecstatic!

So I have one assistant who's been working with me ever since right before my accident. He's actually traveling with me to Los Angeles and he's kind of like my right-hand man. His name is Lucas Rocheleau, and he just gets it and he gets me. He knew me before the accident, and he knows me as I am now – so he understands how much help I need.

JW: Before your accident, were you doing a lot of the work? Did you have groups of people helping you then as well?

MM: Typically not, because my budget didn't allow for it. So, for instance – I mean, this was like weeks before my accident. I had just started teaching at Kennesaw State, and I was working on a piece in Madison, Wisconsin at the Botanical Gardens, which I kind of paused to fly home, start my classes at KSU, and then flew back to finish the piece. I also had a show in Brooklyn that I had to hurry up and make some work for. The show was kind of sprung on me and I was like, “Absolutely, I want to do that.” And also flew back to Tulsa to both tell the fellowship [Tulsa Artist Fellowship] that I wasn't returning and to move out of my studio space – I had a coveted studio space with a garage door that I didn't feel was fair to sit on, since I wasn't using it beyond storage. That was all in like four months, that I was doing all that. I was also working on various proposals, working on a piece I was installing for a design firm at the Renaissance Hotel in midtown Atlanta. Also at that time I was working on an event for Audi and that’s when I crashed.

I learned that your body will shut down. If it's tired enough, it will just shut you off. That's what – they think I fell asleep at the wheel.

JW: That amount of work is immense.

MM: I was trying to dig myself out of another black financial hole that I feel is sometimes common amongst artists, right? Because you need the time and the space to work – and that takes money. Often I've been able to find studio space before I found a living space. In Brooklyn, I lived illegally in my studio for a minute and almost immediately got busted. I mean, I've done that here in Atlanta, because the work has always been the most important thing, you know? And if you don't have a place to work – I've managed to figure out ways to make work, I've built stretcher bars in bathrooms before and been sketching or drawing or whatever on trains, planes and automobiles, you know – do whatever you’ve got to do to get it done.

So yeah. And then of course, I couldn't do any of it when I wrecked. I actually was in Grady Hospital and I was working from my hospital bed, because I had an installation that had to get done or it was like I had to give them the money back.

And it was like – the money was gone, right? So I had to hurry up and figure out a way. And I had friends and assistants step in to help me make that work. And I was, you know, talking to clients and making drawings from my hospital bed at Grady. But I think having that project really saved me and helped get me out of that bed, because it was a struggle.

JW: Looking at your career – there's no break. Every single year you have these immense projects. Which project were you working on in 2019 – during the accident?

MM: That was the piece that was installed in Platform Apartments on MLK. Oh, and it's a daylight piece, which I haven't made another like that one. It's white twine that's been hand-painted with acrylic, and the way it's installed, the color is highlighted when the sun moves across it.

My folks took me to go see it – pretty soon after I left the hospital, so I was still pretty badly damaged. But they came out to tell me how much they enjoyed watching it transform throughout the day. Which of course made me feel really good.

It was the first time I had done anything like that, where I had hired a team and I wasn't there on-site working alongside of them.

JW: Yeah, was that scary?

MM: Yeah, it was. But, you know, I've learned that you do yourself a disservice when you get all freaked out about a project. You know, It's like, it has to get done whether or not you're freaking out about it, and it's easier to make decisions and problem-solve when you're not having an anxiety attack, you know?

So I've just really learned to take people's talents and apply them and work with them to problem-solve. I think that being a teacher has really helped me do that work with people. I acknowledge that they come to me with their own set of skills and talents. So if they have a better way to do something, I'm always open to that concept. I've seen assistants come up with really effective problem-solving.

JW: You were talking about the light shining through the piece, and obviously so much of your work is about light – you’ve mentioned the gloaming…

MM: I think one of the reasons why I'm obsessed with it is because I've spent so much time studying painting, and I think that's something that painters do – we chase the light. When you think about oil painting and how the old masters applied tints to build up the shape, the light is supposed to pass through some of that transparency so you can see what's behind it. I remember talking with Pheoris West about painting and he said that you really should only use a limited palette because having different colors will tie the painting together, and I feel like maybe light does the same thing.

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