Megan McManus
HURL FROM A BLACK HOLE, 2020
15" x 11" x 10.5"
Mixed Media
15 x 11 x 11 inches
 
This sculptural form gathers acrylic nail tips into a single, erupting body. Each nail carries a distinct pattern, color, and labor history, referencing beauty work as both adornment and survival. Emerging from a rough, hand-built base, the piece stages a tension between precarity and excess, softness and endurance. Titled Hurl from a Black Hole, the work imagines care labor as matter violently expelled from invisibility into spectacle. It insists that what is dismissed as decorative, excessive, or feminine is instead forceful, cosmic, and impossible to contain, demanding attention, value, and collective recognition.