Megan Cope: Water is life

Quandamooka artist Megan Cope from Moreton Bay/North Stradbroke Island considers how art and culture can heal Country and Community in her multi-disciplinary art practice. Committed to the continuation of Indigenous cultural knowledge and revitalisation of Country, Cope investigates issues relating to colonial histories, environment and mapping practices through her site-specific sculptural installations, videos, paintings and prints. 

Megan Cope: Water is life brings together a selection of Cope’s recent works that weave together Indigenous and Western histories of sites to challenge our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state and highlight the evolving nature of living sites as psychogeographies.

Recent major public art projects have included the monumental site-specific Kinyingarra (oyster shell) installation Whispers (2023) at the Sydney Opera House, as well as her current work in the 24th Sydney Biennale Ten thousand suns. Cope has been selected for the 2025 Hawai’i Triennial ALOHA NŌ.
 

Artist biography

Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island in South East Queensland, who is also a member of the Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW. Her art has been exhibited extensively throughout Australia in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Hobert, and internationally at Busan Biennale, South Korea (2022); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Musées de la Civilisation in Québec, Canada (2015). She has presented a number of public art commissions Including Whispers at the Sydney Opera House and IN 2017/19 she was an official war artist with the Australian War Memorial. In 2022 proppaNOW was awarded the prestigious US-based Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Politics, a biennial prize honouring an artist or group of artists who has taken great risks to advance social justice.