My work investigates remembrances and interrogates the idea of normalcy as a preferred narrative – the sanitized idea of memory versus the messier truths and discomforts of embarrassing admissions and taboo topics. I am also exploring the idea of communal memory, and how the general narrative of a group subsumes the specifics of an individual, if the collective narrative represents an ideal. Through the use of recurring characters and appropriated childhood spaces, my work explores my own memories and insecurities as they relate to my lived experience as a young woman. 

My current work features a self-caricature named “Chicken Skin”, whose body is covered in keratosis pilaris and awkwardly proportioned to display the parts of myself with which I am constantly uncomfortable and have always sought to “fix”. The works take place in spaces typically reserved for children, as a way of inverting those spaces from places of curiosity and learning into those of self-consciousness and dysmorphia. Chicken Skin and the anonymized figures she interacts with are represented as adults, transgressing in these childhood environments and providing further alienation. 

CV – Maud Madsen