The Poetics of Illegibility: Artist Talk with Tia Madden

Madden’s work as amanuensis and translator of the illegal and covert is extended in this solo exhibition that reads graffiti as notation. In her new works exhibited in the window gallery, the surface becomes text. Graffiti on brick and concrete are remade into a synthetic orthography that recognises surface as author, as interlocutor in mimetic exchange. Far from a notation that denies relation to its spatial and temporal context, these forms cannot (and do not want to) escape accountability to their environments. To what is visible in plain sight.

- Lou Garcia-Dolnik, guest writer

The works in Backjump were initially created as a way of asking what is said by things that resist readability...

- Tia Madden, artist

Hear directly from the artist about the significance of these illegible graffitied forms as seen in Backjump.

Where: Bankstown Arts Centre, 5 Olympic Parade, Bankstown

When: Saturday 30 May, 2-3pm

Light refreshments will be provided.

This is a free event. Please register your attendance for catering and accessibility purposes.

About Tia Madden

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.