Tia Madden

@tia_madden | www.tiamadden.com

Tia Madden is an artist and writer based on Dharug Land in the Blue Mountains. Her installations, texts and drawings examine the intersection of drawing and writing: a space where lines between looking and reading, decoration and notation, and image and word blur and unravel. Asemic poetry, speculative-fiction, indecipherable writing systems and a poetics of ‘uncoding’ come together in her expanded drawing practice, where she explores the potential for abstract marks to behave communicatively when they are framed – or misread – as language. Here, she considers how visual forms can preserve and transmit information, and how that information might then be received or misinterpreted in distant futures.

In 2023, Tia was selected for a one-month residency in Cairo, Egypt, which was supported by a grant from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. She has since exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at Falak Gallery, Cairo; Penrith Regional Gallery; the Blue Mountains Heritage Centre; and Airspace Projects. She was awarded Highly Commended in the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2023) and the Gosford Art Prize (2023), and has been featured as a finalist in several awards including the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award ‘JADA’ (2024), and the M16 Drawing Prize (2023). Tia graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in 2022, and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts (Research) at UNSW 2024-2026.