Meet our Fellows: Maddison Colvin's Eden(s)

Gardens, as OSGF founder Bunny Mellon observed, “are hovering always in a state of becoming.” That fluidity and complexity – along with the many ways that gardens function in our society, and how we control and interact with them - is at the heart of artist Maddison Colvin’s work. 

An interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and educator based in Utah, Maddison is one of our two 2020 Eliza Moore fellows. While her summer residency at Oak Spring has been delayed due to COVID-19, she has been keeping plenty busy over the past few months: apart from moving from Oregon to Utah for a new job earlier this year, she has been adjusting her artistic practice in light of the changes caused by the pandemic. 

“I got so used to being inside that when I would go out on walks in the wetlands near my house, I would almost start weeping because I was so glad to see other things living and progressing and growing,” said Maddison, recalling the early days of the lockdown.  “The other thing was that I've really noticed a lot of other people's relationship to the natural world changing – for example, people have been going so crazy for houseplants; they really want to bring the natural world to them when they're stuck indoors. It’s been interesting and exciting to see so many people get into gardening and growing their own food this year.” 

Maddison’s project for the Eliza Moore fellowship examines such relationships. Eden(s) explores humankind’s visual, aesthetic, and cultural responses to gardens by weaving together essays, photos, drawings, paintings, and facsimiles of other botanical work into a book.

A page from the first chapter of Eden(s) by Maddison Colvin

“I'm really interested in the imposition of creative will and the desire to exert will, or control in some way, over a landscape,” she said. “Not necessarily in a way that's negative, but in a way that's a desire for the positive. I think sometimes that desire for the positive can lead to a form of curation, destruction, or alternation that isn't necessarily that positive for the environment.”

Maddison hopes her work will cause people to think about their relationships with non-human and non-animal organisms, she said. 

“I want people to really think about why they want to be in nature, why they want to control nature, why they want to document nature -  for instance, when you see a flower, is your first impulse to look at it, to pick it, to take a photograph of it, or is it to pull the petals off?” she said. “I want people to be actively thinking about those impulses and those desires.” 

Visiting different gardens has been an important part of the project; one chapter of Eden(s) is about Maddison’s residency at Soaring Gardens, an artist’s retreat in rural Pennsylvania situated on the property of the late painter Ora Lerman. Maddison said she  looks forward to spending time at Oak Spring in order to see “the different ways in which the natural world and the cultivated world can affect each other” in another artist’s garden.

“I think it's really interesting that Oak Spring is doing a combination of wilderness conservation with these formal gardens and vegetable gardens, and trying to make those sustainable. I'm really excited to learn more from everybody there, and have that be a part of this text,” she continued. “I think so far the text has been a lot about control and the failure of control, and I would love to see more coexistence and a slightly more utopian model. I think we all need to look toward the future, toward the potential of community, right now.” 

As the working mother of a three-year old daughter, Maddison’s time to work on Eden(s) has been limited. However, she has been creating a series of paintings she hopes to incorporate into the project: expansive, window-like planes of vibrant plant life clustered closely together that explore humankind’s increasingly fraught and complex relationship with “inside and outside”.   

“The idea is that it's very beautiful and alluring and exciting being in these spaces, but it's also a little overwhelming, or even threatening, sometimes,” she explained. The works are inspired, in part, by the large modernist houses she often saw in Oregon that had expansive windows looking out to the forest.  “There's this kind of barrier or separation that's interesting to me.” 

In addition to painting, Maddison has continued to research and write during “stolen hours” in the evening – and looks forward to spending dedicated time on Eden(s) when she is able to come to Oak Spring.  

“As a parent and an artist, I try to be good parent and be there for my kid, but also to support my art practice so that I can continue to be a complete and happy person. Residencies like the one that OSGF has set up are really making that possible,” she said. “Being a parent artist is hard, but organizations like yours make it a little bit easier.” 

To learn more about Maddison and see more of her work, visit  http://maddisoncolvin.com/. 

All art by Maddison Colvin