Madison Dewar

Madison Dewar is a printmaker and painter from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

She has an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the University of Alberta, and has displayed her work in a variety of festivals and venues throughout the city.

In her work, Madison is currently exploring caves as a source of both comfort and fear.

In 2016, she was selected as an RBC Emerging Artist in Residence at the Nina Haggerty Center for the Arts, where she now works as the studio manager.

In 2022, she held her first solo exhibition "Subterranea" at Lowlands Project Space.

She predominantly works in woodcut and relief printmaking, textiles, and painting in her artistic practice.

Offerings (NAT Art Residency - 06/2024)

Before Altamira

I spend so much time mourning stories, but perhaps some are meant to stay forgotten.

I think of my own time and the things I can only feel in fleeting moments which seem the most precious-

The staccato of the wind. It lapping at my face. My shirt, damp with ocean dew.

Footsteps and words shared across languages. Como se dice “sunrise”? The word for snail. Bull. A female horse.

Setting sun glinting of horns.

The sound of a bird you’ve never heard and will never hear again.

A perfect curl of sea foam-

These sun-soaked memories- these stories without form, without the shape of narrative- will disappear, slowly from my mind and then suddenly with my bones.

Because I cannot quantify them, do they matter less or more?

Covalanas

Red ochre on the wall in the shape of a doe-

ears pricked, legs at the ready,

three lines and nothing more

Our breathing blurs and echoes and then suddenly the question-

“tell me, is she alive? If you say no, I’ll leave you here, and you will say ‘no no no’ so you can stay forever”

The light spins and the deer springs into life, as if she had been waiting to be found-

her legs stretch and

her nose smells sweet sunlight

her eye a burning star

the ochre rumbles and shifting with her stride