Madeleine Joy is a melbourne-based visual artist who works with traditional processes to create works that could be mistaken for digital prints; she is interested in the reclamation of the human hand over new media. Within this practice, she experiments with visual lexicons and hierarchies through the use of pattern-making commonly associated with cross-stitch. Often working in series of three, symbols within each piece are swapped in order to create different tonal weights, creating a shift in the field of perception for each drawing. What information remains through the action of translation, and what begins to dissipate?

Dismantle pays homage to the Art Deco architecture of Castlemaine’s Theatre Royal and the Castlemaine Art Museum, interrogating and dissolving contentious distinctions existing between arts and craft, by merging the languages of each. Referencing craft through drawings that mimic the laborious nature of textile based practice, this process reinstates the hand of the artist amidst the carefully composed forms revered in Minimalism.