Backjump, referring to graffiti painted quickly on a train during a brief stop at a terminal station, is a solo exhibition of works that considers the significance of making a mark, even when that mark – inscrutable, unruly, illegible or otherwise – is not necessarily meant to be read, but simply to be seen.
Through expanded drawing and installation, this exhibition collates and re-assembles graffitied forms collected from the streets of Sydney’s western suburbs into new compositions that move between image and word; abstracted forms which demand both looking and reading at once. In doing so, Backjump looks to graffiti as a type of writing that no longer says anything at all, yet somehow, in all its nothingness, manages to declare – however briefly, ambiguously and anonymously – ‘I exist somewhere’.
Image Caption: Tia Madden, Misreading Misreading, 2025. Installation: stained and resin-coated plywood on steel shelves. Photography: (Jessica Maurer/Rosina Possingham).
about the artist
Tia Madden is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based across unceded Dharug land in the Blue Mountains, and Gadigal land in Sydney. Working primarily through drawing and installation, her practice is concerned with the porous boundary between drawing and writing, the poetics of illegibility, and the potential for abstract marks to behave communicatively when framed—or misread—as language. Part speculative-fiction and part riddle, her work combines traditions of abstraction with the materials, rules, and visual logics of writing systems to create vessels for communication, even if they only speak in worlds outside our own, as a way of unsettling our assumptions of how, where, and when meaning dwells in human-made marks.
In 2023, Madden was selected for a one-month residency in Cairo, Egypt, which was supported by a grant from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. She is one of the shortlisted artists in the 2026 Create NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging); was the winner of the 2025 Tim Olsen Drawing Prize and the 2024 Kudos Emerging Artist Award; was Highly Commended in the 2023 Gosford Art Prize, the 2023 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, and the 2023 Lloyd Rees Emerging Artist Awards; and has been featured as a finalist in numerous prizes across the country, including the Wollongong Art Prize, the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, and the M16 Drawing Prize. She is currently a Master of Fine Arts by Research Candidate at the University of New South Wales Arts, Design & Architecture, and is the Assistant Curator at Lewers: Penrith Regional Gallery.
Image credit: Tia Madden, artist portrait. Photography: Maja Baska