The work: Fionna Madigan, Cottles Bridge Bushscape. Oil paint and cold wax on aluminium panel, 82cm x 82cm.

Fionna Madigan’s art is informed by her immediate environment. While not purely abstract, her work leaves the viewer with the impression of a ghostly landscape. In Cottles Bridge Landscape, forms are suggested but not explicit, present but not definable. Ambiguity of scale is important to the artist, who is interested in how macro and micro realities coexist. Fionna maps out the composition of her works, which are usually large and involve her entire body in a physical process of mark making. What appears as a landscape in Cottles Bridge Landscape could also be the fine details of a leaf. The snail-like, trailing and squiggling patterns are created through Fionna’s use of oil paint mixed with a cold wax medium, which suspends the colour pigment and allows Fionna to work with multiple layers of colour at a time. At one with her environment, Fionna portrays soft, shrouded and temporal landscapes which translate the transience of time and place.

Source: Showcase Fionna Madigan’s - Art Edit Magazine

Victorian Abstract Artists Biennial ‘Of Colour and Light’

West Artspace Catalogue

Opening Speech- 2023 Revere Landscapes Real and Imagined.

Hello and welcome to Revere, Landscapes Real and Imagined.

Fionna is the love child of a catholic priest and his glamorous parishioner. We survived a chaotic and colourful childhood in the heart of Melbourne’s Irish ex-pat community.

Our family life could be volatile and unpredictable, but art was a dependable constant for Fionna from an early age. She got Mako Candles for Christmas -coloured blocks of wax shaped like blocks of chocolate that, when warmed over a heater, could be moulded by hand into anything the heart desired. A wick was then threaded through the centre of it and bingo! A pony candle.

These days Fionna works with oil paint and cold wax medium to create images of mystery and presence. Her intentions are pretty unsophisticated. When you look at the paintings, she wants you to feel good. She wants you to feel your imagination working. She wants you to do some of the work but she wants your job to be pleasurable.

The work invites this dynamic, collaborative engagement. She wants you to feel some of the pleasure that she felt in the making of it- in the viewing of it.

She is interested in the experience of perception; what happens when we look at something; the way our bodies and visual cortex metabolise and interpret information. Texture plays a big role in her work; texture arouses the tactile senses; your body feels it, even if you don’t touch it. She wants our response to the work to be an embodied one.

She is drawn to a fertile zone between abstraction and realism; where scale is ambiguous, when the macro and micro slide in and out of awareness. She starts with a compositional idea, but she is not wedded to it. Improvisation and transience are what its all about.

In laypersons terms and to get back to the pony, she likes to hold the reins, but she likes to hold them loosely.

She keeps the wall between what we know and what we don’t know, permeable. She plays in the space between what we can control and what we can’t. This is so that something more universal can, as she puts it, ‘come through’.

Bird in flight is a lovely example of this. There was never any intention of painting a bird, but it flew in, she could make out its wings, she brought it forward. And now it is.

The art critic Jerry Saltz says ‘ Your work hides from you until you find it. The beauty is that it loves being found as much as you love finding it’. Fionna isn’t coy about the magic. She wants you to feel it too.

This large body of work highlights her delight in flowers, reflections, animals, rivers and trees.

And there is an interior landscape.

A couple of paintings speak more explicitly to her experience of Morgellons disease. Contested illness have uncertain causes, unclear treatments and disputed medical, legal and cultural definitions. In the context of this diagnostic purgatory, Fionna has had to dig deep to validate her experience, but also to transform that experience, into something of beauty.

Morgellons disease defies existing medical explanations, is shrouded in controversy and poses questions about the presumed integrity of our physical bodies in relation to the natural and technological worlds we inhabit.

This is not always the most comfortable ledge on which to dwell; the edge of what we know and what we don’t. Ironically, or perhaps not, it is precisely at this edge, that an artist needs to be.

The theme may be difficult, but the paintings are captivating. In regards to Morgellons, there is a meme Fionna likes ‘you don’t aways have to tell your story, time will’.

However this is Fionna’s time and this her story.

Thankyou everyone for coming; thankyou Anna and staff.

Enjoy the exhibition.

Media Release 2023- West End ArtSpace

'Revere: LANDSCAPES REAL & IMAGINED' BY FIONNA MADIGAN

West End Art Space is proud to announce the latest exhibition by Australian Abstractionist Fionna Madigan, 'Revere'. This new series of work showcases the development of Madigan's visual language; one which thrives in a space between abstraction and realism and  which celebrates the Australian bush.

Artist Bio:

Fionna is the love child of a catholic priest and his glamorous parishioner. Herself and three siblings survived a chaotic and colourful childhood in the heart of Melbourne’s Irish ex-pat community.

In a volatile and unpredictable family environment, art making was a constant and dependable thread. She got Mako Candles for Christmas -coloured blocks of wax shaped like blocks of chocolate that , when warmed over a heater, could be moulded by hand into anything the heart desired. A wick was then threaded through the centre of it and bingo! A pony candle.  

These days Fionna works with oil paint and cold wax medium to create images of mystery and presence.

Fionna is inspired by the beautiful bush setting of Cottles Bridge where she paints, befriends, swims in a cold pool  throughout winter, listens to podcasts, and manages a challenging health condition.

Artiste Statement:

''I am drawn to a fertile zone between abstraction and realism; where scale is ambiguous, when the macro and micro slide in and out of awareness. I commence with compositional goals and encourage random occurrences. Improvisation and transience are integral concepts to my creative endeavours.

Texture works in my painting to create a range of feelings such as excitement, calm, novelty, familiarity, anxiety, tension and resolution. I am interested in the way that the visual cortex metabolises texture, because texture is felt, even if you don’t touch it. It arouses our tactile senses. It is present. Our response to texture is embodied. Our relationship to the natural world is embodied; it is in our hearts, and it is, literally, in our blood.  The colours, flora and skyscapes of the Nillumbik Shire remind me of this.”

Madigan's established practice continues to be widely celebrated. Recent highlights include Mayoral Award 2019 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Art, Eltham, Victoria; first prize, Fairfield FPS exhibition, Fairfield, Victoria; finalist, Boynes International Emerging Artist Award 2020; Of Colour and Light, Women Abstract Artists Biennial 2020/2021 & 2022 at West And Art Apace; finalist 2021 Adelaide Parks Art Prize; finalist 2022 Lethbridge small Piece Art Prize; finalist 2022 landscape prize.

Exhibition Run: February 1 - 25, 2023

Opening Reception: Saturday 4 February 2-4 pm, by Guest Speaker Dee Madigan.

 Opening Reception: Saturday 4 February 2-4 pm, by Guest Speaker Dee Madigan. Dee Madigan is Fionna’s sister and an award-winning creative director and a founding partner of the progressive ad adency, Campaign Edge. She was also the Creative Director for the 2022 Australian Labor Party election win She is a panellist on Gruen and The Drum (ABC TV) and appears on The Latest  and Sunrise (CH7). She is also the author of The Hard Sell (MUP 2014), as well as a contributing author on Mothermorphosis (MUP 2015), Perspectives on Change (ANU 2015) and Unbreakable (UQP 2017). She is on the board of Per Capita and Australians for Mental Health