Madeleine Lynch: Fine Artist

[Interview by Hannah Kirby - First published in ForgePress 7 November]

"I’ve always chosen to draw, rather than paint. I often find great artists’ preliminary sketches so much more expressive, more subtle than their finished work, and really feel that drawing, as a medium, deserves its own acknowledgements.

"Drawing, I feel more like my hands are doing the work. It allows me a more physical relationship with the page – like there aren’t any tools separating me from my paper. I use oil bars, which mean I really have to work and rework my materials, as they just don’t flow as quickly and easily as paint. That’s a conscious choice; I’m forced to go back on my work and myself for my view of perfection. It’s a labour through which painters often start, but it gets overtaken and overwhelmed.

"I was taught life drawing, which helped me to draw formally, and to learn perspective and proportion. Once I’d gained formal skills, though, I had the chance really to consider what art meant to me, and what I wanted to achieve. Since then, my work’s taken a turn from the formal to the more abstract, because I want to do something original and honest – to today, to people and to myself. Regenerating what people have already seen, for me, would be pointless.
This sequence, from an exhibition called Pro Sancta Omnia Sine Nomine (‘For Every Nameless Saint’), was the culmination of about a year’s work around the time of my transition. It had started out with studies I’d made from images of the pietà [Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus], with which I’d been familiar from my Catholic upbringing.

"The more I reworked the images, though, the more oppressive the male domination of the work appeared to me; I found myself drawing contempt and resentment in the face of the cradling figure, which shocked me. In religious and particularly Catholic art, all female figures appeared to have to be qualified by a male presence.

"I decided to start drawing attention to the anonymity of women in religious art by concentrating on drawing the female form without a face. I created the pictures almost in reverse, by smothering the paper in black, and then scraping and tearing into it to expose light. In that way, the exposed female form becomes the origin of light within my work, despite its facelessness.

"I was always aware that what I did here was potentially subversive. In November last year, though, the sequence was exhibited at St. Marie’s Cathedral near Fargate. I had written to the priest there and explained my work, and he was really open-minded – I’ve found there are actually a lot of people in the church who feel the way I do. Aesthetically, too, exhibiting in the Cathedral was perfect. I picked dark wooden frames because they reminded me of the Cathedral pews, and mounted them on gold with the glass lifted off the paper’s torn surface more like relics’ casing. To my mind, I’d tried to arrange the five pieces as much like an altar as possible, and the priest allowed me to show them under a statue of the Madonna and Child.

"That was so fulfilling. It was where the work had started for me, and it felt like it fitted there; the people it was for, were the ones who saw it. For me that’s the whole point – that the people who see my work should be those to whom it’s relevant, where and how it’s relevant. But while it’s regarding female empowerment in religion, hopefully that’ll be everyone."