Meghan Price: Persistent Matter
In Persistent Matter, Meghan Price examines the remarkable endurance of textiles and the archival practices that preserve their fragile histories. Drawing on research into archaeological fibre fragments and museum conservation methods, Price considers how cloth, despite its pliant and yielding nature, has persisted across millennia. Rather than disappearing, textiles imprint, migrate, and transmute, surviving as image, language, memory, and, at times, entirely different materials.
In 2024, Price was invited to tour the textile collection at the Sörmlands Museum in Nyköping, Sweden. Within the museum's storage vaults, she encountered a small box containing dozens of textile fragments excavated from a nearby archaeological site dating back nearly 800 years. Granted the rare opportunity to handle these artifacts, Price became deeply affected by their marginal status within the collection. This encounter prompted questions about how value is assigned to material culture, how institutions determine what is preserved and exhibited, and what inevitably escapes systems of collection altogether: fibres too small to recover, fragments that continue to disperse from the objects themselves, and histories that persist beyond the archive.
Ironically, textiles are often entrusted with protecting objects we assume to be more permanent. In museum collections, muslin cradles ceramics, metals, and glass, quietly safeguarding the very artifacts presumed to outlast it. Working with cotton, discarded plastics, audiotape, and reclaimed fabric strips, Price creates monumental jacquard weavings that magnify archaeological textile fragments in states of deterioration. These works become acts of preservation in their own right, translating vulnerable historical forms into contemporary materials while their original counterparts remain carefully stored in archival boxes.
Glass introduces a sensory dimension to Persistent Matter, translating Price's experience of the museum archive into the gallery space. During her research at the Sörmlands Museum, she viewed and photographed fragments of medieval leather shoes on a light table, where illumination lent the objects an unexpected sense of warmth, vitality, and presence. The light also revealed the delicate layers of protective tissue paper surrounding each artifact, an ephemeral material that stood in quiet contrast to the dark silhouettes of the leather it preserved. Price evokes this intimate viewing experience by presenting the imagery on a glass support, encouraging consideration of material fragility, archival care and the act of looking.
For the first time, Price also presents a series of bronze sculptures that place textile and metal into dialogue across vastly different timescales and cultural associations. Inspired by an archaeological rope fragment she studied in Sweden, the sculptures reflect the phenomenon of pseudomorphosis, in which organic textiles survive through mineral transformation. As bronze oxidizes, copper salts gradually replace or encase nearby fibres, preserving their structure long after the original material has decayed. Unearthed alongside ancient daggers, axes, and brooches, these mineralized textiles embody the central paradox of Persistent Matter: that softness may endure through transformation, and that preservation is not the opposite of change, but one of its most profound expressions.
