Seeing the Strange in the Familiar
An update from artist Megan Nugroho
When we first spoke with artist Megan Nugroho in 2022, we discussed her Ghost Drawings. The drawings recall a warning from Nugroho’s childhood in Jakarta, when her mother cautioned her against purchasing old furniture or other secondhand objects that might contain spirits, benevolent or otherwise. “With the ghost drawings, it was keeping that belief in the supernatural, the magical alive as I move on with life, relocate, grow older…a part of me does not want to let that die.” In Nugroho’s recent work, ghosts have given way to flowers, branching forms, and landscapes, but the pursuit of the magical remains a constant impulse.
That impulse is sustained by her ability to recognize the strange in familiar things: the detail that makes you tilt your head and ask, “What is that?” In Strange Days (2026), Nugroho takes a lily as her subject. Rather than rendering it as a botanical study, she explores its surreal potential. The lily’s warm petals gracefully unfold toward the edges of the frame, drawing attention to the flower’s center: its pistil. The pistil’s ochre limbs emerge from within the flower, their forms almost erupting outward, while the tip of the central limb glows as it bows. By amplifying the flower’s anatomy, Nugroho transforms an ordinary natural form into something unfamiliar and intensely alive.
This approach brings to mind the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, perhaps best known for her large-scale paintings of flowers. Her emphasis on form and color produced visually intense renderings of floral anatomy, to which viewers have often ascribed sexual connotations. O’Keeffe famously rejected this interpretation, writing:
If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it
no one would see what I see
because I would paint it small
like the flower is small.
So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—
what the flower is to me
but I’ll paint it big
and they will be surprised
into taking time to look at it…
O’Keeffe and Nugroho recreate what catches their attention in the world around them. Through exaggeration, both encourage viewers to see what they see. But where O’Keeffe emphasizes the capacity of small things to hold immense beauty, Nugroho pushes toward strangeness. In Strange Days, the pistil seems to have found its own life source, breaking free from the serenity of the petals. Nugroho connects the work to the experience of being a woman and the unpredictable feelings associated with the menstrual cycle. The flower’s transformation becomes a way of thinking about the body as something that cannot always be controlled or fully understood—a living system whose changes may feel strange precisely because they are so intimate.
The Girl, 2023 (left) and The Girl Gone Wild, 2023 (right).
This sense of latent energy carries into The Girl , 2023 and The Girl Gone Wild , 2023, where the flower’s anatomy takes on an even more otherworldly presence. At the center of each drawing, an alien-like form emerges from an intense green background. Rendered in colored pencil, the green retains the marks of Nugroho’s hand, each stroke contributing to an atmosphere of vibrant, almost electric life. The pale, branching form seems to glow against this field, as though we are witnessing the emergence of a living organism whose origins remain unknown. Yet when viewed alongside Strange Days, the source of this alien presence becomes more apparent. The form resembles a flower’s pistil, its unfamiliar anatomy brought into focus through Nugroho’s close observation and exaggeration. It is as if she has zoomed in on the flower’s reproductive structure to reveal just how strange it already is. By isolating and amplifying this small part of a familiar plant, Nugroho transforms it into something otherworldly, revealing the strangeness that gives the natural world its sense of magic.
In a collaborative project made with artist Sam Ticknor, Nugroho created the artwork Forking Paths, 2026 which extends her familiar motifs of branching forms and glowing flowers into a more expansive composition. Ladders emerge from or descend into a pit, introducing a sense of movement and possibility. Nugroho describes the work as a reflection on life’s capacity to unfold in different directions. A map may offer a way to navigate the world, but it can never fully account for the experiences, histories, and possibilities that exceed its boundaries, or for the paths hidden beneath another.
Forking Paths, 2026 .
“I’m very interested in this idea of building a magical composition. When separate, lifeless components are joined together in the right places, how much magic and life can be imbued.”
Alongside her primary drawing practice, Nugroho has developed a collection of smaller experiments incorporating weaving, cyanotypes, embroidery, and collage. These works bring together found images, discarded magazine pages, and scraps of material, often combining different surfaces and techniques within a single composition.
She describes these objects as an important means of sustaining her practice, particularly while balancing artmaking with a full-time job. During a period when she felt frustrated with her work, she began cutting and weaving pages from magazines being discarded at her former workplace. The resulting pieces did not necessarily emerge from a clear artistic direction. Instead, they grew from a desire to find something compelling in the materials immediately available to her. “There’s a somewhat subconscious act of trying to conjure something exciting from a time in my life I felt very frustrated about,” she reflects. “I was also just grasping at any external visuals I could find in hopes that it might lead somewhere.”
Sketchbook Expiriments. (ongoing prject)
Throughout Nugroho’s practice, the familiar is not abandoned but transformed through sustained attention and imagination. Strangeness emerges in the unfamiliar contours of a plant, the histories attached to an object, or the unexpected relationships between materials. Her work suggests that the magical is not simply a departure from the familiar world, but a way of recognizing how much of that world remains beyond our understanding.
See more from Megan Nugroho at https://www.nugrohomegan.com
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