Maddie Cahill Byrne

Artist Statement

My work usually relates to what currently interests me, which at the moment is the ocean, psychic powers, and various sea creatures. My artwork is always very colourful and typically cluttered, often related to outer space and weird futuristic mystical worlds - combined with an oceanic theme, or retro technology. All to create and re-contextualise everything into a new world.

My multi-disciplinary approach to art making often starts with collage, as it is a fun way to gather imagery and colours for making pieces, as well as becoming their own unique objects. I use various materials alongside collage such as crayons, markers, and pastels; for their childishness and textural qualities and their highly saturated pigmentation, echoing my love of 1990s aesthetics. These collages have become the basis for much of the animated aspects within my current body of work where the layering from physical collages collides with the digital age we now live in resulting in a lo-fi and conjured speculative future.