Artist Statement

Madison Smrtic is an interdisciplinary artist living in upstate New York. She is the co-creator and editor of Full Grain Mag, a community grant funded art magazine which showcases up and coming artists and creatives.

Madison has been working primarily in hand-papermaking and fiber since 2016, and this body of work is a reflection of her knowledge. She is interested in the notion of “craft” and what it means to create “fine art” using methods traditionally regulated to the outskirts of museums and fine art institutions. She finds common cause with the feminist craft and “women’s work” movements of the 1970s.

Madison created this body of work to reflect and refract her small scale embroidery pieces. These pieces use an over processed fiber: flax, to create the marks, or stitches. To her, embroidery, and subsequently these pulp paintings, have become a drawn out intentional practice of intuitive design and structure. Each stitch must be intentionally made, however, the color, design, and type of stitch follow no organized pre-thought out structure. The final creation has no record of the labor and time involved. This holds true for papermaking; the countless hours of labor intensive work to create a single sheet of paper would be unfathomable to most. The unseen labor of femininity is echoed in creation