Madeleine Hunter - Artist Statement

 Madeleine was born in London and has been painting and creating for as long as she can remember. From an early age she was writing, directing and performing in plays, designing and making the sets and costumes. These took the form of animated films, and videos as well as poetry adaptations and sometimes projecting photographic imagery onto figures to create light installations. These interests led on to work placements at Vivienne Westwood studio, and Glyndebourne Opera House, where she worked on the production of ‘La Cerentola’ directed by Sir Peter Hall.

 
Madeleine recently graduated from Leeds University, following an art foundation at Wimbledon School Of Art where she specialised in Theatre Design. At Leeds she read Theatre with English, and in her final year became interested in performance art. This was significant because it fused art and theatre together, her two major interests.

Her final piece was an installation in the style of a gallery/exhibition with famous artwork coming to life. The piece captured the spatial relationships and atmosphere of an art gallery, and bringing art and life together by creating theatrical interpretations of famous paintings within a frame, thus blurring the boundaries between art and life.
Starting from an initial concept, she develops the into montages, relief pictures and installations. She then photographs these pieces, which she might project onto human figures. At every stage the works can be complete entities in themselves, but they can also be worked with to inform yet new ideas. In this way the original concept is constantly expanding, and the whole process takes on a cyclical pattern.

"My series entitled 'Work and Play' was developed from photographs taken in London's Docklands. What really excited me about the place was the vast sea of people, either leaving a long day at the office, briefcase in hand, or relaxing in a bar having drinks after work. What really shone through was the sense of anonymity in all these figures. At dusk they were just a merge of silhouettes, and nameless to me as an outsider. .

My more recent work started by exploring ideas around my phobia of birds, which had evolved into 3 dimensinal paintings, photographs of installations combining my own images, and photographs of birds projected onto a figure, and then further work from these photographs.”