“Between Sleaze and Glamour… The result is equal parts alluring and ghastly, a fun-house mirror image of our hyper-consumerist culture. “I’m trying to make something that’s worthless,” Nelson says of her gaudy work. And then: “I’m trying to make something that’s meaningful.” For a moment, both options seem possible.” – Not Real Art, 2021

Madison Nelson is an interdisciplinary artist working in Chicago. Her practice consists of fiber, sculpture, installation, photography, and weaving. Nelson is currently a Fiber and Material Studies MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BFA with a concentration on Sculpture in 2021 from Texas State University.

I create atmospheric and vibrant fiber based works that are saturated with details and dismantle focal points to fuel my fascinations and curiosities in conversation with the relationships of image vs object and memory vs experience. Through manipulating surface depth, volume and opacity, I disrupt viewer perception by generating hallucinatory landscapes of color, texture, and repeating patterns. Old and new digital tools are present in manufacturing the work and are used as collage tactics to distort and reconstruct soft sculptures, weavings, costumes, plastics, photographs, clothing, and found objects. By utilizing patchwork, patterns, and glitch aesthetics, I study emotions through distractions and disruptions to show perception and experience as fragmentation and memory as reconstruction and revival.