Tia Madden

Website: www.tiamadden.com

Email: t.madden@student.unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Peter Sharp, Rochelle Haley

Tia Madden is an artist and writer whose installations, texts, and drawings examine the overlap between drawing and writing. Interested in how humans encode, preserve, and transmit knowledge through mark-making, she draws from the social science-fiction genre to consider how marks can be misperceived over time, reshaping their original knowledge, or potentially, facilitating the generation of new, accidental meaning. Her MFA practice-based research project, tentatively titled ’Misreading Drawing: Legibility in the Gap Between Image and Word’, looks at the possibility of meaning when abstract marks are framed, or misread, as language.

Engaging an expanded drawing practice, Tia builds on the traditions of mark-making, asemic poetry, languages of abstraction, and undeciphered writing systems to consider how visual forms preserve and transmit information. As such, her research seeks to activate, engage, and destabilise the meaning-making process, asking: how can an expanded drawing practice examine the mutability of meaning and legibility in the gap between the image and the word?

Tia received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in 2022 from UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture, and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts by Research, which she commenced in 2024. She has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, including in Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Canberra, and Cairo, and has written and curated for artist run publications and galleries. She was also selected for a one-month residency in Cairo, Egypt in 2023, which was supported by a grant from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. Tia currently works as the Assistant Curator at Penrith Regional Gallery, and is based on Dharug Land in the Blue Mountains.