Maddie Shaw

Artist Statement

Changes in my life have caused me to rethink my definition of home and family and to look at how these definitions influence the way I see myself within other places and spaces I inhabit. The subjects in my work are taken from personal experience and are reflective of individual and collective experiences of sexuality, femininity, family, and home.

My pieces encompass familial ties, mental states of being, and the experiences within womanhood through the development of a visual language similar to that shared by adolescent girls in cartoons and comic books, dolls, video games, and the media. Returning to places and objects that influenced my youthful understanding of art, beauty, and femininity feels significant relative to questions I have regarding memories and current relationships with myself, my family, and my home.

My recent work investigates the way nostalgia colors our memory of the past and our experience of the present. I create highly saturated environments, using color to create a counterpoint to the often ugly or somber undertones. My palette is informed by common ideas about femininity and associations with childhood. I frequently use “girly” hues and satirical, animated figures to create contrast to often melancholy content while subverting notions and experiences of womanhood particularly in its relationship to emotional conditions. I find that playing with flat planes of colors that can be read as childlike, elementary, and even absurd, alongside areas of depth and dimension instills a sense of precarity and discomfort in an otherwise seemingly cheerful or simplistic landscape. The bright, sickly-sweet, contrasting colors, and big, flat shapes in an otherwise life-like realm, paired with distorted figures and subjects allow my work to be read as both humorous and grotesque.

The decisions I make regarding materials and mixed media elements in my pieces are reflective of the chaos and contradictory nature of the themes in my work as well as in the questions I am asking. The fabrics and beaded elements I incorporate in my pieces are a nod to the sweet, sugar-coated innocence of childhood and hint to materials that are reminiscent of childrens’ dolls, floral bed sheets and weathered pillow cases, objects that drench my memory of youth and past sense of self. The physical objects that invade the work’s space reflect the complexity of memories regarding their static but evolving nature and their ability to distort reality.