Meghan Walsh seeks to deconstruct societal notions of material value, beauty, and hierarchies by creating mysterious harmonies with unlikely pairings of materials on a spectrum of economic value to draw attention to the critical importance of inclusion of the smallest, most marginal voices for the collective good - especially in the wake of a changing climate.

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Meghan Walsh is an internationally known mosaic artist, accomplished, licensed architect, and a lead thinker at the intersection of housing affordability, climate justice, energy performance, and finance. Her global perspective comes from living and working in the United States, Prague, Brazil and South Africa, where she completed her master’s thesis on environmentally sustainable housing during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings in 1996. She has worked as a climate resilience subject matter expert in the Obama White House, and immersed herself in uplifting sustainable housing solutions as visiting faculty at Auburn University’s Rural Studio Front Porch Initiative. 

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Meghan's art explores themes of change and the critical importance of framing what beauty there may be in ugliness. Using primarily recycled and sustainable materials, Meghan’s works juxtapose economically precious materials like gold-plated Venetian glass smalti, with things of negative value, such as blown apart tire shards from highway shoulders. In pairing such unlikely partners, she seeks to deconstruct societal notions of material value, beauty, and hierarchies by creating unlikely harmonies. Most recently, Meghan’s creativity has been influenced by the trauma of watching her mother suffer with Alzheimer’s and aphasia – the loss of the ability to communicate with words that make any sense, or to understand others, in any discernible language. Her new line of work responds to this by incorporating aspects of her mother’s life into her mosaics. One of her newest pieces “Tau”, named after a protein that creates tangles in the brain believed to be connected to Alzheimer’s disease, embeds a twisted piece of discarded neon directly into the piece’s mortar, entwines yarn from her mother’s knitting and pieces from her mom’s China collection, along with marble, limestone, glass, and her own handmade ceramic tesserae to create an intentionally fragile work that is reflective of a human brain tragically disrupted by Alzheimer’s. 

 

The recipient of numerous artistic awards, grants, and residencies in the U.S. and abroad, Meghan has selected to represent the United States at a residency called Simposio Mosaico led by Master Giulio Menossi for international artists in Sardinia, Italy and Adana, Turkey, where there are mosaics dating back to 3000 BC.  Her work is held in public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Sardinia Mosaic Museum and the Municipality of Adana, Turkey as well as the DC Commission on Arts in the Washington DC Metro System. A skilled public speaker and presenter, Meghan was also the featured artist at the 2017 Ras Al Khaimah Arts Festival in the United Arab Emirates. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Real Estate Finance from Georgetown University.