Maddy Allan-Rahill

Media Arts & Sciences major, Middle Eastern Studies minor

Through painting, drawing, and digital forms of mark making, I currently work to explore emergence as a concept and its potential through line studies. I search for and highlight interesting or otherwise notable details that contribute to something greater. I identify patterns, systems, and analogies in many realms, including the natural, artificial, physical, psychological, and social. With a current focus on the natural, these details present themselves to me as branches of a tree, the boundary between wet and dry after rain, lichen on a rock, or the path of a bee's flight. In the artificial, I find lines in architecture, pipe networks, or wiring. The physical patterns might result from the movement of a dancer's hand, strands of hair, or wrinkles. The psychological take the form of thought processes, habits, or emotion, and the social as networks of connections across space and time, community organizing principles, or the journey of intimacy. I compose paintings in which I translate these details through observation into lines, encouraging contemplation and pattern identification. Based on my initial body of line studies, I create work recursively, overlaying and adding to itself, demonstrating the underlying unity between our worlds.