Michael Madden
Living in the beautiful countryside between Elora and Fergus, is to be living during an “in between” time when this landscape continues to be transformed and to disappear.
My work is a meditation on environments that have been and continue to be disrupted and re-formed by human interference. This exploration is an impression of what has been altered and normalized as “beautiful”, and includes markers of interruption that point to further alteration. These interrupted landscapes are juxtaposed to the presence of untameable cloudscapes that look to initiate statio: that intentional pause to contemplate what is at stake and the role our choices and inertia play in the midst of our relentless environmental disruption.
The work is rendered with coloured pencils directly upon wood panel. The wood grain, reading as a palimpsest, is visible and integral: the medium remains on the surface of the harder wood fibres and allows light to “occupy” the “in-between”