Madeleine Thornton-Smith

Madeleine Thornton-Smith has training in painting and ceramics, and is interested in the tension between these forms of art making.

‘Remediation’ is the act of re-forming an object out of a material from which it isn’t usually made. Thornton-Smith uses remediation as a method of investigating medium specificity—the location where, and the manner in which, one distinct medium ends and another begins. Employing a slow process of accumulation and repetition, Thornton-Smith uses slip-casting to bring together commonplace studio material surfaces such as bubble wrap, acrylic paint, concrete and expanding foam with hand built archetypal forms from fine art and ceramics.

After completing a ceramics residency in Peru, she began slip-casting rocks, shells and textured walls of the local architecture she encountered, applying these objects to frames, slabs and vessels. This mimetic process interrogates material hierarchies; raising questions about the status and value of ceramics, art and craft.