Description
Fionna Madigan is currently an Artist-in-residence at the Dunmoochin Foundation, Cottles Bridge, Victoria, established by celebrated Australian Artist, Clifton Pugh. Downstream features in Madigan’s 2021 solo show ‘A Magic Window’ held at West End Art Space. The work is intuitive and process driven.
Madigan says about her practice,
“I am drawn to a fertile zone between abstraction and realism and am particularly satisfied when my paintings straddle these genres. While I commence with compositional goals and encourage random occurrences, improvisation and transience are integral concepts to my creative endeavour. I use very little traditional blending or perspectival techniques to achieve depth. I work in layers. You perceive a number of different layers at once and the piece makes sense in a sort of suspension whereby you don’t see its discrete layers – it hangs together almost like a prism or a hologram, and you are willing to suspend the fact of the layers.
There have to be enough prompts in the painting to enable you to do that, to enable you to make that leap of the imagination a plausible proposition. When you make that leap, your right brain is energised, you relax, your imagination is activated.
My intentions are pretty unsophisticated. When you look at the work, I want you to feel good. And if you’re not feeling relaxed and open, I want you to be able to look at a painting and for there to be enough prompts in it that it will nudge you into a relaxed and open-minded space. I want you to feel your imagination working. I want it to play with your neural pathways. It’s about landscape but it’s also very much about psychological perceptual experience. It’s a magic window.”
