My art is the relic of an exploratory impulse and of a particular rabbit trail exploring the boundaries between academic art and marginalized art practices, especially women’s handicrafts. It’s also about time and memory—the ebbs and flows, and how we continually tear apart the past and reconstruct it to form our identities. In using deconstructed materials to construct my work, I’m trying to evoke particular universal memory I believe we all share: that shining limnal moment when we first realized there exists a constructed, civilized beauty in the world which is distinct from the beauty of the natural world. In that moment, we emerge from a psychological state of innocence—where everything appears natural, organic, eternal, and whole— into a different state of understanding, sensing that some beauty is fashioned from pulling the natural world apart and putting it back together again in meaningful ways and that nothing in nature is permanent.
—Madara Mason
Bodies in Repair
2019
In Search of Lost Time
2017
Animals
2014-2019
Landscapes
2015-2019
Digital
2015-2019
In the Media
An Interview with Theresa Bakker
Theresa Bakker was kind enough to take the time to interview me for my recent exhibit in the UA Museum of the North. The following is excerpted from their blog and you can read the rest of the interview there.
“Is there a theme to the artworks that you selected for this show?
So many artists have made powerful political statements regarding women’s work, and I don’t feel I need to repeat those statements. But by the same token, in rejecting that emphasis, I might ALSO be guilty of rejecting women’s work as irrelevant. The traditions I allude to in my work are more meaningful than the generic label of women’s work: the reuse of old materials, mending the broken, using patterns to bind a community through the use of shared imagery, and constructing objects that carry the memories of a family or individual.”
Museum of the North Cafe Gallery
From April-July 2018, a selection of my recent work will be on display in the University of Alaska Museum of the North cafe gallery. The Museum recently announced this exhibit: “Madara Mason is an eclectic artist. Her work combines paper, beads, found objects, dressmaking patterns, grant rejections, prescription labels, block prints, magazine and book cutouts, and traditional media like acrylic paint and ink. Born and raised in the South, Madara moved to Alaska in 1994 and began painting the animals and plants she found in her backyard.”
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From the Newsminer
Fairbanks artist ‘searches for time’ in busy schedule Dorothy Chomicz dchomicz@newsminer.com Jul 31, 2017 (2) Eric Engman/News-Miner Photos FAIRBANKS — With two kids, a husband and a full-time job teaching at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Madara...
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