Megan Major is a Detroit-based artist working in experimental photographic processes, including cyanotypes and lumen prints that engage light, weather, and organic matter as co-authors in image-making. Her work explores transformation, material decay, and ecological and emotional states of latency.
She is the co-founder and co-organizer of the Detroit Art Book Fair. Major holds a B.A. in Photography from Grand Valley State University and has exhibited widely across Michigan and nationally. Her recent work was developed during a residency at Vermont Studio Center.
These works were made during a winter residency at Vermont Studio Center, a season offering little light and less certainty. Working in processes that depend on illumination, the aim was not to wait for better conditions, but to discover what becomes possible within diminished ones.
Ice-covered plants and snow were carried into the studio to thaw across the surface. Milkweed gathered in Michigan arrived with another geography, another timeline. Copper powder, road salt, and ammonium chloride introduced chemistry as a collaborator; the environment remained a co-author.
The images move toward abstraction, where scale blurs. Chemical blooms and pooled pigment can read as aerial or celestial, yet remain grounded in salt, water, and light.
This way of working mirrors endurance. Difficult periods offer fragments and unstable conditions, asking what can still be made. Alchemical Winter holds that tension—between scarcity and emergence, surrender and persistence—continuing as the light nearly disappears.