January 14, 2000.
Gallery Crawl: Four Artists
By Graham Shearing
TRIBUNE-REVIEW ART CRITIC

In her show at the Clay Place, Megan Sweeney builds up large ceramic sculptures that heighten the mundane.  Watching birds in her garden (or wherever), she has woven into the avian matrix anthropomorphic features that are both fanciful and engaging. In her studio she builds sculptures embodying that experience. Whimsy is a horribly overworked word, properly suggestive of a caprice or a conceit, but it seems to apply in Sweeney's case, for her oversized birds, equipped with the heads of humans, behatted and often bespectacled, promise all of the fantasy and nonsense you can find in Edward Lear. They are the products of close observation and a fecund imagination. They are grave portraits of little, self-important creatures.

"Miss Orange" in foreground and "Dancing Couple" in background, by Megan Sweeney at the Clay Place in Shadyside.  (Photos by Allison Corbett/Tribune-Review)

This body of work forms part of the sculptural work of Sweeney, which transforms human and animal parts through unusual juxtapositions into complex metaphors about life. On that level they are difficult to decipher and somewhat private.
As with Edward Lear (or another traveler in Fantasyland, Lewis Carroll), the task of interpretation is surely precarious. 
 .
Sweeney builds up her figures from the base, coiling terracotta in much the same way as the
ceramics of native Americans in the Southwest construct their figural pottery. She uses a low-fired glaze, often black and matte, which adds to their impressive gravity.

Giant birds with human heads are featured in
Sweeney's work at The Clay Place.

See another article on Megan Sweeney.