Madeleine Pledge

Madeleine Pledge’s work often uses the language of clothing and furniture as a way to approach bodies, subjects, objects and power through the surfaces of fashion and design. Strategically borrowing from a lineage of existing artistic production that includes Bridget Riley, Isa Genzken, Sylvie Fleury, and Rosemarie Trockel, her work is an attempt to find and hold space between the repetitive tyranny of capitalist production and fictions of individualised authorship and artistic originality.

The substances and surfaces she uses are often vulnerable, dissolvable, or digestible – re-aggregating existing materials into uneasy composites. This is the element of the work she has chosen to draw on for Inland: producing flat, wall-based sculptures that sit between drawing and object, using an amalgam of 2020 / 2008 issues of Vogue, porcelain slip, and calcium or activated charcoal powder. Set hard, these works can be preserved on the wall as sculptures, but they could just as easily be re-digested by the earth if they were to be composted.