Madelyn McKenzie is an emerging artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, working primarily across ceramics, sculpture and installation. She has just completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University whilst also participating in Craft Victoria’s Fresh! Fellowship Program. Madelyn’s Honours research project ‘The shields of the subconscious’ explores the intersection between materiality, memory, and embodied experience through experimental, installation-based sculpture. Working primarily with ceramics, she engages with clay using processes of repetition, assemblage, and material responsiveness to cultivate an embodied and iterative understanding of her memory.
Through this making process, Madelyn investigates how the practical knowledge embedded in sculptural practice becomes intertwined with personal history and memory. The sensory engagement with the material transforms the act of making into a site of introspection, where the boundaries between conscious intention and creative unconsciousness blur. This rhythmic state of making evokes the inner worlds she imagined as a young girl, a beautiful place of imaginative escape that now resurface through the gestures and transformations of clay.
Grounded in phenomenological theory and informed by Somatic Experiencing, her practice positions the body as both a site of knowing and healing. The shadows that emerge are not merely physical assemblages but manifestations of embodied perception, where memory and material presence coexist in tension. Through these sculptural experiences, she seeks to reconstitute fragments of personal history, representing the subconscious elements being both beautiful and painful.
Instagram: @madelynmckenzie_
Email: maddymck02@gmail.com
